Random Thoughts on Coding

With the release of JEE 6 and the Servlet 3.0 specification came support for asynchronous servlets. While continuations and Comet are not new, the fact that it is now part of the servlet specification, and could be “baked in” to an application, piqued my curiosity. Although I have not used...

This post is my solution to Texas Hold’Em. The problem involved taking 7 cards and determining the single best 5 card hand. Like the previous problem, I decided to implement this in Ruby. I probably went too far because what I ended up with was a command line program that...

Earlier this year I was influenced by two things that got me to re-think what I work on in my free time. The first was this podcast from Software Engineering Radio with “Uncle Bob” Bob Martin on software craftsmanship. The second was a blog on the value of fundamentals in...

This year one of my goals is to try and become proficient in using ANTLR. I think that learning to translate text or build an external DSL is skill that, although not used everyday, will be very useful to know. For my first attempt I settled on something fairly easy,...

I have read over and over the past year that starting a blog is one of the best ways to improve your value as a software developer.  Also, a great way to learn something is to write about it.  So with that in mind, I have started this blog.  I...