Featured Blog Posts (422)

One thing I noticed in 2014 was an overall push to “learn to code”. Today computers are everywhere and we are only getting more reliant on them every day. It makes sense that more people and kids in particular are being exposed to programming. Here are some resources that I have found very easy to set up if you want to teach your kids about programming. Since I mainly use Windows this will be mainly a Windows centric post.  Also because this is a list of resources for kids I am…

Being able to solve problems and fix bugs is probably high on the list of things that make a programmer a good programmer.   These days programming is assisted with many tools and techniques.  Stepping through code using advanced IDEs and debuggers find many issues before they become issues.  Intellisense, code completion and syntax highlighting also reduce bugs before they can become bugs.  Exception handling and error logging help a lot when issues occur in programs.  Testing…

At the time of this writing, we have had two Nodeschool events here in sunny Honolulu, so tl;dr it’s been pretty successful. Admittedly, I had concerns going in to the first event. Sure, Nodeschool has been successful worldwide with new chapters opening every day, but that doesn’t mean it’d be a guaranteed success. Being the organizer for Ohana.js (our local Javascript…

In my experience with software development thus far, I find that requirements analysis is often overlooked or completely ignored. I believe that by not spending some time understanding the need for the software that's about to built, the developers may really be building an inferior product, which in the end is costly for the stakeholders of the project.

From my experience, there is often the misconception that the requirements process, in which requirements are discovered, is a slow…

For whatever reason, testing did not seem to be a focal part of Apple's development tools until Xcode 5. Prior to then, tests were typically implemented using OCUnit, but it was difficult to integrate with the Cocoa framework. That changed in Xcode 5, where OCUnit was swapped out for XCTest…

The evolution of the Internet and various esteemed digital technologies during the 21st century wholly revolutionized the way we do business, socialize with people, and consume entertainment. Whether you are a college student or professional, digital devices serve as a valuable tool in fulfilling your personal and work-related endeavors. But, have you ever wonder about the impacts of your daily exposure to technology? Without even realizing it, there’s a scientific and a neurological shift…

In one of my recent projects, I needed to import a lot of data from csv files into a database as persisted domain objects in a web application.  This file import functionality wasn't just for application bootstrapping or a one-time legacy data migration, but for a recurring task that allowed the web app to receive updates from a third party vendor.

The number of records in each file could reach into the millions, so I knew from the outset that the plain-vanilla method of creating…

In the past few years, I've written a few json API's in rails.  There are a few trends driving the popularity of API's, one being Service Oriented Architecture, and another being client side rendering.  

Service Oriented Architecture can apply to all services, not just browser accessible ones.  It consists of making services available via a standard like SOAP or JSON, to increase re-usability and modularity, SOAP and JSON being the two most popular SOA protocols.  SOAP is XML-based,…

I like to try to keep up with new technologies.  Being a developer who has used Microsoft development tools all my career I’m always interested in seeing what is coming next.  Recently Microsoft unveiled ASP.NET vNext and it seems to be their most ambitious version of ASP.NET yet.

Here are some of the things I’m looking forward to in ASP.NET vNext

Build Not…

The motivation behind this blog was a question on how different online advertising partners identify you and coordinate their ad efforts in real time bidding ("RTB") for a slice of your attention when they show you an ad. This is meant to explain a technique called "UUID synching". However, that got me thinking I should frame the…

Revulsion of click-bait content has recently boiled over again, accompanied by some fascinating analysis about how higher quality, more meaningful content is so much better at engaging readers for longer amounts of time and the tantalizing thought that ““you’d probably do better sitting on the right hand hill”... …

Recently I visited Japan.  The last time I visited was in 2010.  Japan has always been known for it’s electronics and technology so I was looking forward to seeing how it’s changed in four years and how it differs from the U.S.  These are just my personal observations so they may not be indicative of actual trends or market share figures.

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Recently, I've been tasked with maintaining software that is driven by T-SQL. Unfortunately, these applications did not have sufficient documentation describing what the software does and what its expected behaviors are. Thus, I was thinking of a low-cost and simple way of introducing unit-testing so that I can have a better understanding of what's going on in the software and to provide a means of stating my assumptions on what the expected behaviors are.

In this post, I describe in…

As an engineer, you often find solutions to problems, not the other way around. However, once in a blue moon, a solution comes along that appears so interesting and full of potential that you feel compelled to dream up applications for it. Such is the case with Thalmic Lab's Myo armband. The inventors…

At work, I was recently tasked with building a web site wrapper around a Heroku software-as-a-service that we had built earlier last year (Bomberman).  While the core functionality of this new application is identical to the Heroku service, we were required to implement our own subscription service to replicate the purchasing and billing functionality provided by Heroku and throughout the…

Create apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.1 without coding.

The biggest issue facing Windows and Windows Phone is the relative scarcity of apps compared to Android and iOS.  Microsoft faces an uphill battle in attempting to sway companies and mobile developers into building apps for Windows Phone.  

One of the offerings created to help close this gap is called App Studio.  App Studio was first released last…

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service ran its annual selection process to distribute the quota of 85,000 high-skilled worker visas among over 172,000 applicants in April.  Tech firms who rely on the H-1B visa category are finding this bottleneck in the labor market increasingly difficult to manage and appear to be developing strategies for…

While looking through some old code, I found my first iOS projects that I did while I was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The earliest of which goes back to November of 2008, which was 4 months or so after the App Store opened its doors (according to Wikipedia). Since then I had developed 3 apps (two ended up in the App Store), the last of which I worked on in 2010.

Whenever…

One of the key challenges for online marketers is coordinating effectively the wide range of digital channels for outreach and the fragmented and siloed reporting these channels generate. From my recent research of mobile marketing tools and platform vendors, the situation is improving for marketers -- although it is far from completely resolved.

Starting from a mobile tool-set such as SMS/MMS and voice,…