Featured Blog Posts (422)

We use Heroku, a PaaS (Platform as a Service) vendor, quite often for hosting small and medium-sized web applications. It makes it drop-dead simple to install, deploy, maintain, and scale your projects on Amazon AWS's infrastructure. Being a fully managed service, they also take care of ongoing hardware and OS-level maintenance, and have engineers around-the-clock monitoring and responding to infrastructure emergencies. Furthermore, they…

Software engineering is a great career to be in because we get to build amazing things without having to get up from our chair.  However, that is also the problem with our profession... we don’t get up and out of our chairs often enough.  I’m not a health expert, but I’m pretty sure our bodies were not built to sit for long periods of time.  I know it is hard to step away when…

A team that includes three co-founders from Bump Networks on Maui is about to launch FlikDate, a nifty looking mobile video dating app. They got covered in TechCrunch three weeks ago!

It's kinda like ChatRoulette but uses FBConnect for signups, so people are less likely to act badly (and they can be easily tracked and bounced). The monetization…

I know "Microsoft" is not the first word that comes mind when you're writing a ruby application but since Google dropped the free tier for their translation service the Microsoft Translator API is a good alternative for a small/personal project that you don't want to have to bother with the monthly bill.  

Recently I've had to use this API in a project and this weekend I extracted the functionality out into a simple gem.  I present to you 'microsoft_translator'  (queue…

(Note: This post originally appeared on Aloha Startups, but it's important to get everyone in Hawaii's tech community weighing in on this topic. Please add your comments and continue the conversation. Also, if you have thoughts about Hawaii's first accelerator, which was recently announced, email Rechung Fujihira with your ideas.)

Seems like every other person I talk with has a plan for a local incubator…

In recent years smartphones have become part of many people's daily lives.  They are used to communicate, stay updated, take photos, listen to music and entertain us with hundreds of thousands of apps. People carry their cellphones around with them wherever they go.  They wake up with them, eat with them and go to bed with them.  



For companies this presents another opportunity to market and reach out to customers.  If you or your company is considering a mobile presence there are…

A few years ago the release of the Go programming language was announced, but I ignored it until I recently

discovered it was being used on large back-end systems at Heroku and at Google.  I also discovered that the Go team  included Rob Pike (formerly from Bell Labs and member of the Unix team) and Ken Thompson (also from Bell Labs

and worked on Unix and…

Earlier this year I was conducting a training class on programming and found I needed to provide trainees with some models for evaluating the maturity of a  technological concept, device, or platform. One such model that stuck with me over the years is Gartner Research's Hype Curve Model. If you are not familiar with them, Gartner is a technology research firm composed of independent analysts based around the world. Their Hype Curve Model…

Microsoft has come a long way when it comes to support for unit tests.  They basically co-opted NUnit as their basic building block for testing.  Of course they re-branded it as MSTest and added feature/bug tracking and some more stuff all bundled together into TFS.

Given their willingness to get that deep into the unit test craze, their choice of interfaces for ObjectContext (on the server side) and DataServiceContext (on the client side) seems a bit odd.  There is no interface to be…

This post is just a friendly reminder for those that practice TDD/BDD to make sure they are not putting more ceremony into their tests than is necessary.  Use mocks and stubs instead!

Mocks are just stand-ins that behave like the thing we want it to represent.  Stubs will fake a method call and return a canned response.  These save time both in setting up the test and in running it (depending on if your real objects are persisted in a test database).  When you test a method…

Aloha TechHuians,

Apologies for being a bit late this month. I just returned from New York and I'm prepping to leave for Tokyo in a couple days. I'm getting too old for this :-)

This month we had some excellent blog posts including:

• Security Wargaming: Capture the Flag by Dan Nishimura…

When I talk to people from software development industry about usage of agile practices vs. waterfall they always tell me agile (e.g., Scrum) is the standard in project execution, that there is almost never a reason not do to it. The only reason I hear for waterfall usage are projects that actually require waterfall usage by contract (e.g., government projects) or projects that cannot be done in iterations (e.g., writing software for fighter jet).

To get to the bottom of this…

Recently Microsoft released ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta.  The new Web API framework is included along with this release as part of the ASP.NET and Microsoft web platform family.  The Web API framework is Microsoft’s latest solution to creating simple RESTful web services that can be consumed by a large range of clients. Unlike asmx and WCF services the Web API aims to be a simple RESTful way to create web APIs.



Getting Started:



If you do not have Visual…

I often find myself responsible for designing system architectures. This isn't an accident. I like figuring out the big picture that causes all the pieces of a system to fall into place. The better the architecture is, the more the answers to follow-on decisions (e..g, system boundaries, class hierarchies, internals APIs) seem self-evident. With a solid architecture, first-order features have elegant solutions that automatically extend to second-order features and system…

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in Stripe’s Capture the Flag, a security wargame designed to have you think like

an attacker and understand what it takes to produce a secure program. Participants are given an initial login/password to a server and the objectives are to exploit a set of…

So, your jealous about all the new technology stacks that seem to make life so much easier? You no longer have to be.  With the help of a javascript library available at codeplex.com and a very simple implementation of WCF Data Services utilizing the latest Entity Framework, you can open up your data store to the world with ease.

Lets start with the Entity Framework.  It's the 3rd or 4th attempt by the boys at Redmond to provide a serviceable ORM with a Microsoft logo.  This…

Pacific Corporate Solutions has partnered with the Aloha United Way to assist in grassroots fundraising for the most vital needs in our community. You now have the opportunity to invest in your community by donating your…

House bill HB 2319 is legislation that would provide funding to establish venture accelerators in Hawaii.  Venture accelerators are entities that combine hands-on mentoring of startups with some seed capital to "accelerate" a startups' growth and prepares them to compete for follow-on funding from venture capital investors.

The following link will take you to the Hawaii State Legislature website that…

Productivity and concentration are two very important words to someone who writes code for a living.  There is a wide variety of tools, methodologies, tricks and “hacks” out there that claim to help one improve in these areas.  One such technique that I've adopted over the past couple of months is known as the “Pomodoro”.



The Pomodoro Technique was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980's and is easily summed up in a few simple rules.  It encourages you to accomplish more in a…

I would like to share with you a message from Kym Pine.  I asked her to address the concerns mentioned here on Tech Hui and she did. What she says here about legislators being open is true, her quick response to my request is a great example.  Here you go:

"Aloha TechHui members, I am writing to deeply apologize for any

offense we have caused you or your industry this legislative session.

I have whole heartily supported the tech industry for…