Over the weekend I put together a project as a precursor to an interview. I really like interviews where I have a chance to solve a problem that’s more meaningful than generating a random number efficiently. The pre-interview question came in the form of a sketch of the application. This worked out great since I suggest always starting with a sketch drawn by hand. Here’s what they wanted: Choice of technology The instructions indicated that I could use any technology that I was familiar with, as long as I included the libraries necessary......
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I have a large budget for books (but thanks to Amazon it doesn’t have to be as big as it could be). Sure it’s true that most of the information in programming books is online and available for free. There may even be substance to the argument that most books are out of date as soon as they hit the shelf because technology moves so fast. Oh well. I get huge value from books. They save me many hours of time that I might spend scouting around for a snippet here or an......
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For the user interface layer of the licensing system I was interested in using a framework like Wicket. It was a lot of work to setup. The process was made somewhat frustrating by the fact that most of Google’s results are a few years old and deal with older versions. I did finally get it working and here’s the process. Other articles take the default Google App Engine project and modify it to accommodate wicket. I decided to go the other direction and start with the wicket quickstart. This is the process I......
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How frameworks came to be Engineers have a few potentially conflicting tendencies that can become very pronounced in the software they write. One tendency is that we’re empire builders. In other words, we build, enhance, improve and in other ways expand the scope of our software solutions over time. Not to mention that we want our solution to be accepted, embraced and adored as the best possible solution for the problem we set out to solve. The result of this tendency can be seen in the ever growing, ever more complex frameworks available......
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Programming has evolved in very significant ways over the last few decades. There have been some significant strides forward in terms of language structure, reduced complexity and programmer productivity. One of these shifts was from procedural style programming using a language like C to object oriented programming using a language like C++. Most modern languages support objects, inheritance and other object oriented constructs. However, not all programmers use these the right way. As a matter of course, most introductory material in programming is procedural in style (a linear sequence of commands). It’s important......
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