I've been meaning to follow up on Chris Sass' excellent post on growing pains.  A related side effect of code that has grown too complicated is unit tests that are impossible to decipher.  As your ActiveRecord model becomes bloated, the tests written for it have to mock out too many things.  This makes it nearly impossible to know why the test was created and what, exactly, is supposed…

HPU captured first place in the Hawaii site of this year's ACM International Programming contest, for the second year in a row. HPU's winning team placed 19th out of 111 teams in the Pacific Northwest Region, an impressive feat.



Winning team: Kevin Goo, Kenneth Chai, Kwok Cheung (four problems solved)

2nd place team: Jarred Jobe, Melvin Tomas, Jessia Soriano (three problems solved)

4th place team: Precious Binas, Abe Pineda, Nathaniel Befus (three problems solved)…

This week, I'm deleting lots of my code.

This is actually a pretty common occurrence for me. In this case, a UI pattern that I came up with for a project works well in the small, but doesn't scale up. Other times, I've worked on a chunk of code and revisited it enough times that its structure was no longer clear, and the cognitive effort of remembering all its inconsistencies significantly outweighed the benefit of keeping it. Every once in a while I'll have thought of a better way to…

A few weeks ago Microsoft released a preview for TypeScript.  What is TypeScript and why would you use it?  Initially TypeScript may look very similar in function to CoffeeScript or Dart.  These are two technologies TypeScript often gets compared to because all three can be used to generate JavaScript.…

If you have been part of building an application that has lasted longer than a month then you've probably had some troubles as the project grows.   Business logic requirements get more and more complicated.  Features change direction.  You occasionally "hack" something just to satisfy a release or an urgent bug fix, saying "I can refactor/clean this up this later..."

Then one day "later..." is now.  New features are getting harder and harder to implement.  Everything seems intricately…

WCF is a framework for building service-oriented applications.  The flexibility of the framework makes it very powerful, but that power requires some wisdom in the implementation.  In this post, there will not be many answers, but I hope to help you determine what questions to ask.

Sharing assemblies between the server and the client

Many developers like to do things such as override ToString().  Not surprisingly, that code will not survive being sent over WCF.  It is…

Last week we made the basic WCF service, based on the template from VS2010.  A set of defaults that can be built on.  To make your own service, the assumption would be to make another interface, implement it, and then copy the app.config.  For the most part, that is correct.  What is less obvious is where those values come from, and what do they mean.  This week we will create our own service, and modify the app.config to expose it.  Everything we will do this week builds on the project from…

Windows Communication Foundation is a framework for building service-oriented applications.  Over the next several weeks, I intend to write about WCF and share some of my experience working with it.  This specific post covers a very simple getting started scenario.  It does not assume you know anything about WCF, or have ever seen it before.  It is a step-by-step guide to creating a service and a test case for it.  I do assume that you have a version of VS2010 that includes the test…

Over the past year, the City and County of Honolulu and Code for America pushed to make the city's data open to the public. The city has a tight budget and can only dedicate a small amount of resources to the creation of applications using this data, so opening it up allows people in the community to work with this data. Recently, they published a list of their available datasets …

When Mika and I started Ikayzo seven years ago I got everything wrong. Because I enjoyed a good relationship with my previous two employers I was confident they would become my first customers. Surely I could easily sell to local companies as well. Although we were a new company, I had a solid software development resume and some experience with business development. I thought recruiting would be easy because we could offer the ability to do interesting work in paradise. I…

MVC, MVP, and MVVM are some of the common patterns to guide programmers toward creating decoupled solutions.  Learning about these is not a trivial task, picking the one that is best for a specific problem is a challenge, and implementing it correctly based on the descriptions I found on the internet would be even more challenging.  I have gone back and pulled out the earliest references I could find to these patterns for the definitions and explanations, but then put them in a modern…

Okay, so actually I'm very impressed with what enterprising coders have been able to do with fantastic libraries like NodeJS, PhantomJS, JQuery, mootools, etc.  They've take away a lot of the pain and to them I'm very grateful.  Making javascript work more in the fashion of other ECMA standard…

About a year ago, inspired by the legendary Aloha on Rails, a Ruby on Rails conference organized by Seth Ladd in 2009, a bunch of regulars at a local Honolulu Ruby user group aloha.rb (http://www.meetup.com/aloharb/) decided to organize another Hawaii Ruby conference in 2012. After a lot of hard work, Aloha Ruby Conf (http://aloharubyconf.com/) is…

It was with a heavy heart that we gave notice to our friends at the Manoa Innovation Center yesterday. Its time for Ikayzo to graduate to a larger commercial space. We are excited about having a new office, but we will miss the MIC community and our corporate home tucked away in beautiful Manoa valley.

Ikayzo has been at the …

It always seems like we have more to do than hours in a day -- waves of work demands, constant family obligations and a cacophony of phone calls, emails, texts and reminders. Amidst this overload, it’s increasingly hard to focus on the things that are important to us and give them the level of attention, passion and creativity we’d like. Here are some basic guides I’ve found helpful for creating the mental space for making smart choices on what to pay attention to and getting these things…

The topics I have been selecting to write about are a reflection of things that have come up over the previous week.  The topic this week is logging.  Logging is an extremely valuable tool when developing and debugging software.  It can make the difference between a thirty second scan of a text file and several hours of debugging.  Given the importance of logging there have been at least a few attempts at creating logging applications.  Log4xxx type loggers have tons of neat features.  As…

connascence

= con (e.g. together) + nascence (e.g. birth or coming into existence)

= to come into existence together as well as to change together, to die together

= a useful concept for writing maintainable…

The use of "includes(:association_name)" in rails is a widely accepted rails best practice to prevent n + 1 queries in your views. If you aren't sure what either of those mean check out the ruby on rails guide about eager loading associations.  When you are retrieving a collection of…

There are several interesting research projects going on in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) at UH Manoa, ranging from social network analysis to continuous data processing for mobile applications. Being a recent Master's in computer science graduate, I've heard about many of these projects directly from the professors. While I encourage you to read more about them on the…

Web Site Security Tips

When developing web sites it’s a good practice to address security from the start.  Here are some basic security tips that I find many sites overlook.

1. Use different passwords for your server, database, FTP and other logins.  I am often surprised to find many sites that use the same admin password for all their systems or use the same default password without forcing a password…