Archive for the ‘ Software Development ’ Category

Ruby Tuesday: Pitfalls of Prototyping in Rails

My last Ruby Tuesday post was pretty laudatory regarding prototyping in Rails.  In this post I’m switching gears and exposing the pains and limitations with Rails. The development team at my current startup is composed of engineers and designers, basically I make everyone on the team write code  I understand that Rails’ benefit is [ READ MORE ]

jQuery Basics

I’d been hearing a lot of buzz around jQuery and how much developers like it.  While I myself am not a front-end developer and prefer doing mostly back-end work in Java or Rail, after I saw jQuery in action at SXSWi I wanted to learn to code it in first hand. One of the reasons I [ READ MORE ]

SXSWi iPhone Insights

At the SXSWi conference this past week I attended a lot of great talks on iPhone applications that covered its user experience, development, and how to create apps that emulate the features of a native app but are quicker and easier to create. User Experience Josh Clark’s talk on creating apps that are “TapWorthy Applications” was one of [ READ MORE ]

Importance of an IDE

The first time I saw my VP of Engineering use Idea Intellij I feel in love with it!  All those shortcuts, a debugger, running a server, refactoring code, inserting exception handling, and the ability to do auto-complete!  I was coming from an Emacs, NEdit, VI background, which are all powerful in their own right.  I [ READ MORE ]

Ruby Tuesday: Debugging

When I was a freshman at Duke, coding away in Teer basement, I would often hear disgruntled engineers shout: “Damn, I’ve got 300 syntax errors, I left off the semicolon!  Why does everything have to be so exact?”  Those were the days of coding in C++, a language in which you had to actually compile, [ READ MORE ]

Ruby Tuesday: Podcast

I find it hard to learn with just one medium like a classroom or a book.  I need multiple sources of information to drill home a subject (I could of course just be dense).  I started learning Ruby on Rails with tutorials, which are great if you want to learn a few things and do [ READ MORE ]

Takeaways from Girls in Tech: Catalyst Conference

Today I attend the Girls in Tech: Catalyst Conference at the Common Wealth Club in San Francisco.  It was a great meeting ground for all girls in tech.  I was introduced to VCs, CEOs, and of course fellow femgineers!  My panel was: “Curious About Coding & Developing: Developing Creativity & Building a Business.”  Here is [ READ MORE ]

Freemarker Browser Issue with Date Formatting

When I have to write an internal tool I use Freemarker as my templating engine of choice, because in one file I can write html, and then access Java objects that are passed in a model. Its faster to use for development than engines like Velocity or XMLC, and has enough functionality to write [ READ MORE ]

The Importance of Readability

When I first started coding I believed it was good enough to get stuff working, and then move on to solving the next problem.  I’d spend a little time designing, but most of my time implementing and testing.  My primary concerns were correctness followed by efficiency.  I didn’t see the point in re-factoring code until [ READ MORE ]

Positional Dependency causes Bugs for Newbies

Fixing bugs is a good way to learn a new code base.  You often go through the procedure of understanding the high level software architecture, and are then given what appear to be fairly straightforward bugs, however, if the nuances of a system are not understood you will end up introducing more bugs than you [ READ MORE ]