It's actually happening. I'm writing a book. I saw a gap in the programming world. Most languages have an extensive standard library and core that a lot of programmers are missing out on. I was doing things the long way because I just didn't know the standard library had something built in. I'm trying to fill that gap with deep looks at the standard library of your favorite language. My first step is called Go, The Standard Library, about the ne…

Service Oriented Design (also known as Service Oriented Architecture) is a design technique used in software projects, both large and small. It follows the idea that you divide up a program into separate isolated pieces, or services. This sort of separation has a number of advantages. You can test and debug the pieces individually. You can change out pieces for new designs without affecting the rest of the system (provided the new systems use th…

In my previous post, I talked about kindlebility, my little nodejs application for sending articles to your Kindle. It was initially just built for one person, but then I was like “screw it”, and opened it up to the world. I gave it a nice(ish) front page, an explanation, and a builder for the bookmarklet. I used zepto for the Javascript stuff, and the Google Font Directory for some nice fonts. All you need to do is drop either of your Kindle em…

I don’t know if you know this, but everybody and their dog is writing node.js applications. It’s more popular than Kanye memes. It’s a contagious bug, and I caught it too. I had a one specific use case that it was perfect for, since a Javascript library already existed to do it. Another idea came later, and that’s the one that started it for me. So let’s get on with that. shortestpaper This was the one I started on. The basic problem was that mo…

When it comes being great at what you do in life, there’s no real formula. Some people have that natural talent for something, and others just love it enough to dedicate the time to get better at it. Regardless of how you ended up where you are, there is always room for improvement. I’m going to talk about some of the things that have helped me along the way become better at what I do: write kickass software. Realistically, you can substitute “S…

I didn’t want to write about the iPad on day one, because I was fairly negative overall. I’m still not completely sold on it; it’s missing some things for me. Granted, I’m not the target audience for this device, and all these things I’m going to talk about are my pressure points. It you think the device will work for you, fine, but for what I want to do with it, it’s not quite there. No card slots The thing is big enough to put a card reader in…