What to Read
If you’re choosing software, I wrote a somewhat irreverent guide on how to do that. Even software engineers will find it useful.
If you’re a developer, I wrote a career course. If you’re early in your career, it’ll add a million dollars to your lifetime earnings by giving you a clear, upward path. Supposedly knowing a little about negotiation adds a million bucks (compound interest, etc.), and this goes way beyond that. Many (most?) senior devs don’t know this stuff.
If you are considering going to college, or have a kid, I wrote how you’re probably going to waste $200K on your education. But also, how not to waste that money.
If you’re curious about how America will radically change over the next 5-10 years, I wrote about the rise of the robot chauffeurs. Or as most call them, autonomous vehicles. I spent weeks researching it, and can’t tell you how many times my mind was blown.
I also give talks on careers and programmer productivity, if you need a speaker for your conference. Reviews have all been positive.
While I’m changing how you see the world, here are three documentaries that have done that for me:
Latest Articles
Web Framework Performance Benchmarks
This is making the rounds and is pretty interesting: http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/framework-benchmarks/ My framework of choice, Grails, doesn't look spectacularly fast, although I already knew that. However, it is nice to see that it is notably faster...
Cebu City: First Impressions
I've recently arrived in Cebu City, Philippines. My impressions of the city are colored, of course, by living in the US, but also by spending the previous 2 months in Bangkok. Here's what struck me. Arrival Touch down in Manila (MNL), but almost didn't make it as...
Bangkok: First Impressions, Observations, and Misconceptions
I've been in Bangkok for a week and it's an interesting city. Even though I heavily researched it (including spending time on expat forums and talking to former residents) there were some surprises. Here are some of them. It is shocking to me how quickly I've...
Basically, I’m just gonna walk the earth.
I am beginning a grand adventure. Well, for me, anyway. At the end of this year, I will be flying to Bangkok, Thailand to start a 6 month (or longer) trek abroad. You know, like Caine in Kung Fu. Well, not exactly. This isn't a vacation. It's an experiment in nomadic...
MySQL Failed to open file – error 2 and 22 on Windows
I recently had to restore a MySQL backup. It had been a while since I used MySQL, having switched to Postgresql sometime back. First thing I noticed was the lack of a GUI admin tool that PG spoils you with. Making matters worse, the command line tool isn't even added...
Companies Using Grails
I'm pretty excited about Grails, but am often asked for social proof. Well, by every measure, ((Tiobe, job listings, etc.)) Groovy is the #1 JVM language after Java, and Grails is the #1 full stack web framework. ((Granted, I can only think of 3 others, Play, Roo, and...
Merging XML Files With Groovy
I needed to generate an XML file from database tables and the plan was to use Talend Open Studio. Talend is an ETL tool that generates data integration jobs in Java. The community edition is free and I'd been using it for several other data tasks for an ecommerce...
The Paperless Business Card
I have come up with a simple idea that will have a positive, global environmental impact. I'm talking about the end of the business card as we know it. Have you ever had a box of 500, maybe 1,000 business cards, handed out a few, then thrown the rest away when your...
Optimal JVM settings for STS/GGTS
I recently switched from Eclipse 3.6 to STS 2.7.1 (based on Eclipse 3.7). Ditching my old .project and workspace settings files along with the move has made for a smoother experience; it seems these files get corrupted over time, ((I've had issues with things like web...
CC3260MT.DLL Is TiVo
I was trying to launch a Tomcat instance in Eclipse and it complained that port 8080 was in use. This scared me, since to my knowledge nothing else used that port. Was it spyware? I visited http://localhost:8080 and saw: Access violation at address 32658D8F in module...