2011

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The Importance of Development Environments

My first job as a software developer was in 1998, while I was an undergrad at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ.  The project was simple: build a JavaScript application to front a website that helped people incorporate a new business.  This was long before "ajax" became the new hotness, but I'd built full [...]

.NET/Silverlight Developer Needed

The State of Oregon Public Health Department needs a rockstar .NET and Silverlight developer to customize a health and hospital information application.  The position is a six-month contract, and is on-site at the State offices in Portland.  There isn't an official job posting up yet (should be later this week), but if you want to [...]

Adobe, Mobile Flash Player, JavaScript, etc.

Before you click over this because you know me as a Flash hater, give me two seconds.  That's not what this post is about.  It's about a larger issue.  It's about how awesome it is to be a web developer these days.
Ten years ago, being a web developer sucked.  Deployment was easy (rsync to production [...]

CFSCRIPT-based Query of Queries Gotcha

I'm hardly the first to blog about this (see here or here), but you're using the new-in-CF9 Query object to execute a query of queries (QofQ), you'll run into scope issues.  Specifically, the CFQUERY tag executes in the context it is written, but the Query object is a CFC and so follows all the normal [...]

Migration Complete!

This morning I cut barneyb.com and all it's associated properties over from my old CentOS 5 box at cari.net to a new Amazon Linux "box" in Amazon Web Service's us-east-1 region.  Migration was pretty painless.  I followed the "replace hardware with cloud resources" approach that I advocate and have spoken on at various places.  The [...]

JIRA Subtask Manager

If you use subtasks in JIRA, you've likely had issues with trying to manage them.  It's very difficult to get a comprehensive view of subtasks for a ticket all in one screen.  Using a little tweak to the JIRA configuration and a small Greasemonkey script, I think I've made the process much easier.
First, you need [...]

Syncing Files on the Cloud

A couple weeks ago, I gave my "Replace Your Iron With A Cloud" talk from cf.objective to the CFMeetUp.  If you didn't catch it, you can view the recording on that page.  Several people both during and after the presentation had questions about syncing files between servers.  This doesn't really have anything to do with [...]

Boggle Boards

In case anyone wants to know, here are the specs for Boggle – both for Original Boggle and for Big Boggle – in a handy machine-readable format. The format is line oriented with each line representing a single die, and the sides of the dice delimited by spaces. Note that there is a [...]

Visiting Recursion

Recursion is a very powerful technique, but when processing certain types of data structures you can end up with problems.  And not the "compiler error" kind of problems, the bad semantic kind.  Fortunately, at least one class of them is pretty easy to solve with visit tracking, though it's a subtle solution.  But I'm going [...]

Need A Job?

I have a need.  A pressing need.  I need new coworkers.  Three of them.
Boring stuff first.  Mentor Graphics Corp is the EDA industry leader and makes all kinds of crazy design and simulation software for electrical engineers, and now embedded developers.  If you have a cell phone or a computer, it's almost guaranteed that you're [...]