Programming and politics

Right now Apple and Google are in the midst of major upgrades to the OS on their devices, the iPhone OS and Android. If you develop for thes...

Earlier this week, I gave a talk about Scala with Bill Venners and David Pollak . In my slides , I had an example of a factorial function in...

You ever need to test that a bunch of variables are not null/empty/true? Here is a quick and dirty way to do it in ActionScript 3.0: private...

The object-oriented programming tenet of encapsulation can lead to some ugly looking code. Objects should not expose their internal state, ...

One of the worst kept secrets in the tech world was revealed on Wednesday night when Google announced Java support on the Google App Engine....

Remember back when people realized that the Internet was a valuable way to reach customers and potential customers? You would see all of the...

One of the nice things about living in the Bay Area is that we have a lot of major professional sports teams: two NFL teams, two MLB teams, ...

This happens to me a lot: Take a look at the stack trace that gets sent to Apple: So I think this is being caused because I set the storage ...

If you are an iPhone developer, you were probably excited about Apple revealing a beta of OS 3.0 and the corresponding beta of SDK 3.0. Ther...

Twenty-five years ago, football fans were eagerly awaiting the NFL draft. There wasn't the ESPN/Mel Kiper hype that we have today, but n...

I had a fun exchange on Twitter recently with @jamesiry and @codemonkeyism about how to hire developers. I think my thoughts on hiring are ...

The other day, I made a really dumb Tweet about Java collections. I tried to come up with an excuse for it, but there really was none. Thi...

Last week I wrote about a day of infamy, but did not get around to talking about this. I was too happy about President Obama following thro...

Today is a great day for America, and a day of infamy. Do you want the good news or the bad news first? The good news is that today is the b...

The Lift web framework hit its 1.0 release today . Major congratulations goes to the Lift team. I have been lucky enough to get to know Lif...

Well not quite, but spring training is here. My local teams, the Giants and A's, both play their first spring training game today. Tim L...

Dave Briccettit asked: What’s the Scala way for this type of read loop? My answer: import java.io._ import scala.io._ import scala.collectio...

Upgraded IntelliJ to 8.1 this morning. Launched it and got this: That lovely message box is 2891 pixels across. So wide, that you cannot eve...

Tonight was the monthly BASE meeting. Jorge did a great talk on Scala actors. Before the talk, Dick was talking about looking for a good ...

Web scale development is cache development. Oversimplification? Yes, but it is still true. Figuring out what to cache, how to cache it, and ...