Links for December 29th through January 8th

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Vinny

Nuance DragonDrive – Voice Recognition Optimized for Automobiles – Dragon Drive offers drivers personalized access to content and services in the car through deep voice integration, while ensuring seamless connectivity and end-to-end delivery of all services.
Leverage the Sencha Touch Class System and more in your Node.js app – For those of you who love Sencha Touch as much as we do, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Touch Node – a Node.js module that will enable you to leverage your knowledge on the back-end as well as the client.
BOWER: A package manager for the web – yum/apt-get for the web – Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.
The Little Book Of Modern Front-end Tooling #nodejs – A free open-source book introducing you to the world of tooling for modern web applications.
cue.language – Java library that provides the basic natural-language processing capabilities – A small Java library for simple text analysis – counting strings, identifying languages, and removing stop words.
Open Source REST API for Mobile Enterprise Application Development – Backend as a service (BaaS) – Our REST API with JSON objects provides the perfect backend for mobile applications written in either HTML5 or native client technologies like iOS, Windows 8, and Android. More backend-as-a-service
15 hot programming trends — and 15 going cold – What follows is a list of what's hot — and what's not — among today's programmers. Not everyone will agree with what's A-listed, what's D-listed, and what's been left out. But that's what makes programming an endlessly fascinating profession: rapid change, passionate debate, sudden comebacks.
Red Hat and the CentOS Project Join Forces to Speed Open Source Innovation – Red Hat, Inc, (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and the CentOS Project today announced they are joining forces to build a new CentOS, capable of driving forward development and adoption of next-generation open source techn
The Four Stages of Disruption – While I was speaking with some entrepreneurs recently on the topic, the question kept coming up: “If we’re so aware of disruption, then why do successful products (or companies) keep getting disrupted?”
Using WebStorm to maintain a Jekyll site – I've only covered a few features of WebStorm, the ones that I've found I'm using mostly on a daily basis to work with Jekyll / GitHub pages, but obviously as Web IDE it supports a ton of other things such as JavaScript, LESS, CSS, et al.
The Science of Choosing EC2 Reserved Instances – In this talk, Cloudability VP of Product Development Toban Zolman walks you through the most common scenarios for RIs, shows you how to make the best possible decisions for RI purchases, and how to significantly reduce the time needed to make those decisio
7 Ways to be a Better Programmer in 2014 – Programming – Coders make resolutions, no? If your to-do-better list is still empty, consider these ideas from other programmers to put to use in the New Year. Even the smartest folks have room to grow. The following excerpts are contained in the book 97 Things Every Pro
How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood – To understand how people look for movies, the video service created 76,897 micro-genres. We took the genre descriptions, broke them down to their key words, … and built our own new-genre generator.
GWT.create Conference – Presentation Slides – Presentation Slides from the largest event about GWT in 2013 with 2 days and more than 60 presentations.
Why I’m interested in Bitcoin – Chris Dixon – I believe the only way the technology industry can offer meaningfully improved financial services is by building new services that don’t depend on incumbent companies. Bitcoin is a serious proposal for dramatically improving the payments industry. There a
Koa – next generation web framework for node.js – Koa is a new web framework designed by the team behind Express, which aims to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs.
Jackson – Unmarshall to Collection/Array – Mapping json arrays to java collections is one of the more common tasks that Jackson is used for, and these solutions are vital to get to a correct, type-safe mapping.
Enterprise In 2013: Enterprise Ascends Into The Cloud – Enterprises ascend, spies abound and drones descend. A look back at the the enterprise in 2013.
Why OpenStack Needs Red Hat – ReadWrite – OpenStack has a lot going for it, but not leadership. Red Hat may change this.
The Decline of IE and Firefox – Windows and IE are dying under the assault of iPads and other tablets from the left, and Chromebooks from the right. This is not surprising, or even news to people who spend a lot of time in the tech world. What surprised me recently was how precipitous th
Ketosis – advantaged or misunderstood state? – In part I of this post I will see to it (assuming you read it) that you’ll know more about ketosis than just about anyone, including your doctor or the majority of “experts” out there writing about this topic.

Links for December 22nd through December 27th

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Vinny

Getting excited helps with performance anxiety more than trying to calm down, study finds – People who tell themselves to get excited rather than trying to relax can improve their performance during anxiety-inducing activities such as public speaking and math tests, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association
Spring 4 Enhances Support for Java 8, Java EE 7, REST and HTML5 – Pivotal released Spring 4.0, the first major release since 2009. The new release supports Java 8 with expression of callbacks using lambdas, JSR 310 Date and Time API, & parameter name discovery. Java EE 7 support includes JMS 2.0, JTA 1.2, JPA 2.1..
What Makes a Great API? – John Musser explains how to transform a good API into a great one based on his experience with thousands of APIs at ProgrammableWeb and API Science.
Front end Developer Interview Questions – A list of helpful front-end related questions you can use to interview potential candidates, test yourself or completely ignore.
Tour of the NoSQL database OrientDB – Every now and then you come across open source projects that just amazes you. OrientDB is one of these projects.
What do you get when a Document Database combines with a Graph Database? – Imagine a product with the Flexibility of a Document Database and
the ability to express Relationships like a Graph Database. This is OrientDB.
Managing a Startup Isn’t Different – Don’t Re-invent Everything – What troubles me sometimes is seeing startups that re-invent tried and true management principles, or misinterpret them, or even ignore them, for a lack of interest in researching or learning the prior knowledge that already would have served to solve the
The Future of JavaScript MVC Frameworks – If you treat the browser as a remote rendering engine and stop treating it as a place to query and store crap, everything gets faster. Sound like something familiar? Yeah, computer graphics programming.
Apache Sirona aims to provide a simple but extensible monitoring solution for Java applications – Apache Sirona aims to provide a simple but extensible monitoring solution for Java applications
Summernote – Super Simple WYSIWYG editor on Bootstrap #summernote – Super Simple WYSIWYG Editor on Bootstrap
Authbahn – Open-source real-time framework for Web, Mobile & Internet of Things – The Autobahn project provides open-source implementations of the WebSocket and WAMP protocols. WebSocket allows bidirectional real-time messaging on the Web and WAMP adds asynchronous Remote Procedure Calls and Publish & Subscribe on top of WebSocket.

Links for November 17th through November 22nd

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Vinny

Introducing node.js Tools for Visual Studio – Scott Hanselman – Just when you thought it couldn't be crazier in Redmond, today they are introducing node.js Tools for Visual Studio!
Apple’s iOS7 Native JavaScript Bridge – The combination of JavaScript support in your native iOS client and the proliferation of JavaScript server technology Node.js makes for exciting opportunities in “asymmetric” JavaScript code re-use for your native iOS App, web client and of course backend
Ionic: The Most Advanced HTML5 Mobile App Framework – Ionic is a beautiful front-end framework for developing hybrid mobile apps in HTML5.
Tableau 8.1 is Available: You Asked, We Delivered – We're happy to announce that Tableau 8.1 is now available around the world. In this release we're delivering a host of features inspired by your ideas.
Tableau 8.1 covers a lot of ground: from enterprise features and enhanced mobile authoring, to sophisti
Google is building a Chrome app-based development environment called Spark – The Next Web – Google’s Chromium team never ceases to amaze. Its latest project is a Chrome app-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) codenamed Spark.
ReportServer – Professional Open Source Business Intelligence and Reporting – ReportServer integrates many free and commercial reporting engines. This allows you to use existing reports directly and choose the engine that best fits the current need for new developments.
Using Sencha GXT To Build Interactive Web Apps That Manage Big Data – GWT is a great framework for developing small and large interactive web applications. Sencha GXT is a huge addition that gives developers all the tools they need to build great looking and easy-to-use user interfaces. If you are in the process of evaluating web application frameworks, the combination of GWT and Sencha GXT should be high on your list.
We Analyzed 30,000 GitHub Projects – Here Are The Top 100 Libraries in Java, JS and Ruby – We chose the 3 top languages on GitHub – Java, Ruby and JavaScript. For each one we analyzed 10,000 projects (i.e. GitHub repositories) leaning towards those that have been favorited the most by developers.
Why Office 365 is a better Office – Microsoft's flexible approach to Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Office means each business can get the right mix of cloud and local for its needs
High performance libraries in Java – There is an increasing number of libraries which are described as high performance and have benchmarks to back that claim up.
Could Tizen be Android’s next nemesis? – Tizen is an up and coming open-source operating system based off of Linux. Like, Android, Tizen is extremely flexible in its uses. Tizen also allows a wide variety of app development as it supports apps running on HTML5 as well as other related web technologies to allow apps to run across multiple device categories. For example, an app on Tizen would be coded in HTML5 and it would be able to run on everything from smartphones to laptops and even to bigger devices such as TVs.
The rediscovery of India | McKinsey & Company – Is diversity an excuse for disunity? CNN’s Fareed Zakaria says Indians must embrace their common ambitions if the nation is to fulfill its tremendous potential.
How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management – Harvard Business Review – That, in a nutshell, is the principle at the heart of Google’s approach: deploying disciplined data collection and rigorous analysis—the tools of science—to uncover deeper insights into the art and craft of management.
Windows and Line of Business Applications: No Good Options – So while it pains me to say it, companies that are looking to develop a new line of business applications should seriously consider abandoning that idea and build an internal website instead.
DevTools Snippets – A collection of helpful snippets to use inside of browser devtools – The snippets can be used in any browser console. Chrome provides a 'snippets' feature that can be used to manage the scripts, while Firefox has a 'scratchpad' feature that lets you run, edit, and save chunks of JavaScript.
Debugging JavaScript – Chrome DevTools – As the complexity of JavaScript applications increase, developers need powerful debugging tools to help quickly discover the cause of an issue and fix it efficiently. The Chrome DevTools include a number of useful tools to help make debugging JavaScript less painful.
5 Advanced Javascript and Web Debugging Techniques You Should Know About – In this article we will discuss 5 advanced techniques which web developers can use to reduce the time they spend debugging and squash challenging bugs by using new tools available to us and taking advantage of the new features offered by debuggers.
Dart SDK 1.0 is here, and it’s on a quest to slay JavaScript – Google’s intention to build a front-end development language for building web apps was first made public two years ago. Today, it was announced at Belgium based Devoxx that Dart SDK 1.0 had finally been upgraded from test version to production-ready option
Elasticsearch & Kibana – visualize logs and time-stamped data – visualize logs and time-stamped data – Elasticsearch works seamlessly with kibana to let you see and interact with your data
Another day, another Java menace: Ceylon has landed – This week’s Devoxx conference in Antwerp saw the launch of two box fresh languages: Google’s Dart SDK 1.0, and Red Hat’s Ceylon 1.0. Creator Gavin King has been adamant from the earliest development stages that the intention has always been to create something that can run alongside Java – but designed as a language and SDK for business computing that learns and builds on Java’s successes and failures

Links for October 14th through October 20th

Posted on October 20, 2013 by Vinny

Spring-Data-Rest – expose JPA based repositories as RESTful endpoints. – spring-data-rest, a recent addition to the spring-data project, is a framework that helps you expose your entities directly as RESTful webservice endpoints
Hadoop 2.0 Makes Big Data Even More Accessible – The new major-version release of Apache Hadoop will enable apps to directly connect to stored data.
Really? Java developers love writing non-Java – What language do Java developers love to write in? The results of a survey of 100 Java developers may surprise you
10 Ways To Make Evernote Rock Harder – Accessories and add-ons that make note-taking easier and way more useful than you might have ever thought.
Inside GitHub’s Super-Lean Management Strategy – And How It Drives Innovation – Using a DIY management strategy pulled from the open-source world, GitHub has built a product that coders everywhere love. But can it actually work anywhere else?
Open-source Libraries from our Java Web Stack – Palomino Labs Blog – A while ago, I wrote about how to set up Guice, Jetty, Jersey, and Jackson and then how to calculate metrics about Jersey resource methods. We’ve subsequently open sourced some libraries to make it easy to use these (and other) techniques.
PhoneGap Explained in 5 Minutes – PhoneGap allows you to create cross-platform mobile apps using web technologies. It is not a tool for converting websites into apps. While it is easier for web developers to build mobile apps with PhoneGap than to develop them using native tools, it is not turnkey or simple
Unit Testing Best Practices in AngularJS – What should I be testing and when should I be writing tests? A frontend development article by Andy Shora
How exercise boosts brain health – Research has shown that exercise is good for the brain. Now investigators have identified a molecule called irisin that is produced in the brain during endurance exercise and has neuroprotective effects.

Links for August 3rd through August 10th

Posted on August 10, 2013 by Vinny

Google, Microsoft play catch up to Amazon, add load balancing, auto-scaling to their clouds – JavaWorld – Google rolled out load balancing features to its public cloud service today, allowing customers to automatically scale up and down virtual machines to accommodate unexpected spikes in demand.
Firefox, Chrome strengthen in-browser debugging – JavaWorld – Google has been paying attention to Web developers as well, updating its Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools), a set of Web authoring and debugging tools built into the Google Chrome browser. Perhaps the most notable update is the introduction of Workspaces, a built-in source code editor that could eliminate the small but still frequent process of flipping between an external code editor and a browser to check a newly edited Web page
Holacracy | Social Technology for Purposeful Organization – The Holacracy governance process is not governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people” – it is governance of the organization, through the people, for the purpose. It liberates an organization to find and express its deepest creative capaci
The management framework that propelled LinkedIn to a $20 billion company – Weiner believes getting your “boat” to the best possible destination requires a clearly-articulated vision and mission. These statements ultimately inform and invigorate a company’s strategy and objectives. Perhaps most importantly, leaders need to talk the talk and walk the walk on their professed values to keep the entire company unified and moving in the right direction.
Twitter’s Killer New Two-Factor Solution Kicks SMS to the Curb – When you enroll, your phone generates an asymmetric 2048-bit RSA keypair, which stores the private key locally on the device and sends the public key, which Twitter stores as part of your user object in our backend store, to the server.
SQLFiddle – A tool for easy online testing and sharing of database problems and their solutions. – SQLFiddle – A tool for easy online testing and sharing of database problems and their solutions.
LightAdmin – Pluggable CRUD Administration Java Framework. Best alternative to scaffolding. – Pluggable data management solution for Java web applications developed in a “Rapid” manner! The primary goal of the project is to speed up application development by bringing pluggable fully operational data management back-end for JPA based applications and to relieve your codebase for more important stuff.
Metrics, a Java library gives you unparalleled insight into what your code does in production – Metrics is a Java library which gives you unparalleled insight into what your code does in production. Metrics provides a powerful toolkit of ways to measure the behavior of critical components in your production environment
ORMs vs SQL: The JPA Story – previously wrote about ORMs vs SQL and received a lot of reaction to it–most of it positive. Some of it was predictable ("you don't know what you're talking about (because you don't agree with me)") but one reaction from a couple of people surprised me: they took my post to mean that I was against persistence abstractions. I will now expand on those points with a specific example: the Java Persistence API ("JPA").
Web Tracing Framework – Rich tools for instrumenting, analyzing, and visualizing web apps. – Web Tracing Framework – Rich tools for instrumenting, analyzing, and visualizing web apps. Make your app jank-free at 60fps!
Why does Angular.js rock? – Angular Tips – Angular.js is a MV* (Model – View – Whatever) Javascript framework which is maintained by Google which excels in the creation of single-page-applications or even for adding some “magic” to our classic web applications.

Links for July 11th through July 26th

Posted on July 27, 2013 by Vinny

What’s New in Eucalyptus 3.3: AWS-compatible Private Clouds for Dev & QA – Review the latest AWS-compatible features in Eucalyptus 3.3, including Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudWatch, and more.
Learn why Eucalyptus is the ideal solution for developing and testing your apps built for AWS and how hybrid usage between Eucalyptus and AWS will make Dev and QA more agile and productive
Services, Not Devices is the best way forward for Microsoft – The solution to the secular collapse of the PC market is not to seek to prop up Windows and force an integrated solution that no one is asking for; rather, the goal should be the exact opposite. Maximum effort should be focused on making Office, Server, and all the other products less subservient to Windows and more in line with consumer needs and the reality of computing in 2013.
OpenStack’s Future Depends on Embracing Amazon. Now – The time has come for the OpenStack community to choose a public cloud compatibility strategy that will position the project for dominance in the private and hybrid cloud markets.
Udacity Blog: New Course: The Design of Everyday Things – Design 101: The Design of Everyday Things is based upon the new edition of The Design of Everyday Things (revised and expanded: to be published in Fall 2013).
More Git and GitHub Secrets – This is the brand-new, action-packed sequel to the original Git and GitHub Secrets talk I did in 2012. For one, it has more emoji.
ZeroMQ instead of HTTP, for internal services (August Lilleaas’ blog) – This article describes how to use ZeroMQ for RPC calls to internal services. HTTP is the canonical choice for public facing services. But for RPC to internal services in systems composed of many small parts, you're probably better off using ZeroMQ instead
This Explains Everything: 192 Thinkers Each Select the Most Elegant Explanation of How the World Works | Brain Pickings – In 2012, the question Brockman posed, proposed by none other than Steven Pinker, was “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” The answers, representing an eclectic mix of 192 (alas, overwhelmingly male) minds spanning psychology, qu
Google and Microsoft spent a combined $3.4B on infrastructure last quarter — Tech News and Analysis – Microsoft invested $1.79 billion in “property and equipment” during its fiscal fourth quarter, while Google’s second quarter saw it invest $1.61 billion
Divshot 1.0: Visual Front-End Development for Bootstrap and Beyond – Today we are proud to take the wraps off of Divshot 1.0. This next stage of our visual HTML builder for Bootstrap (and Foundation, and Ratchet) is simple like a mockup tool, powerful like a text editor, and packs more new features than you can fit in a <marquee> tag.
Tableau takes its data-analysis software to the cloud – Tableau has gotten into the SaaS game with a cloud-based version of its popular analytics software. Called Tableau Online, it’s essentially the company’s server-based version delivered as a service.
Puppet Labs acquires Cloudsmith to ease devops’ automation burden – Puppet Labs is acquiring Cloudworks to make it easier for devops people to roll out software updates on servers configured exactly the way they should be, on premise or in the cloud.
Review: Puppet Enterprise 3.0 pulls more strings – Version 3.0 of Puppet Labs' configuration automation tool shines with speed boosts, orchestration improvements, and deeper support for Windows servers
The future of Linux: Evolving everywhere | Open Source Software – InfoWorld – Cemented as a cornerstone of IT, the open source OS presses on in the face of challenges to its ethos and technical prowess
Why Microsoft’s reorganization is a bad idea – In my (very-biased) opinion, I believe collaboration is fundamentally broken at Microsoft. It is all about politics, not great outcomes, and that is absolute death in a functional organization, which has nothing but collaboration to hold together cross-fun
The Great Gatsby Curve: Inequality and the End of Upward Mobility – Is the American economic system fundamentally unequal, perpetuating income inequality and stymieing upward economic mobility? Or do families — by virtue of their differing genes and values — reproduce income inequality?
Using Information About Our Network to Remove Monitoring Noise – In cases like this we need to make our monitoring system more aware of the dependencies exist between these checks so that we can eliminate the noise. To do so we use a number of open source technologies:
Do Things that Don’t Scale – Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got elec
Why mobile web apps are slow | Sealed Abstract – this is the most complete and comprehensive treatment of the idea that many iOS developers have–that mobile web apps are slow and will continue to be slow for the forseeable future.
One big threat to cybersecurity: IT geeks can’t talk to management – Quartz – A new report on the state of risk-based cybersecurity management helps explain why IT employees and their corporate bosses don’t see eye to eye about hacking and other computer-based threats.
The report, titled “Are Security Metrics Too Complicated for Management?” is the latest installment of an ongoing series by Tripwire and the Ponemon Institute.
Minified.js – A Truly Lightweight JavaScript Library – Minified.js is a client-side JavaScript library, comparable to jQuery and MooTools in scope. Its features include DOM manipulation, animation, events, cookies and HTTP requests.
Hibernate adds OSGi Support – Hibernate, the popular Java ORM implementation, has recently added OSGi support, enabling Hibernate to be used both as a standalone Jar and also in an OSGi runtime
Why is nobody using SSL client certificates? – In the current state, this excellent idea is rendered completely useless by the awful usability and the completely detached nature: This is a browser feature. It's browser dependent without a way for the sites to control it – to guide users through steps.
Do the right thing, Wait to get fired – But greatness rarely happens by following rules, process and structure. That is why companies also want to find employees ready to take risks, make decisions, try new things, move fast and even break things.
Three big takeaways from the Microsoft reorg | CITEworld – Our new strategy will put us right at the intersection of the consumerization of IT and the evolving needs of the enterprise customer, delivering the devices that employees want and the productivity, security and control that IT managers need.
Top 10 Ext JS Development Practices to Avoid | Blog | Sencha – Based on a review of our work over the last few years, we came up with this list of the top 10 development practices we recommend you avoid in your Ext JS apps.

Links for June 13th through June 21st

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Vinny

Oracle’s Ellison spills beans on upcoming SAP HANA competitor and Database 12c plans – Oracle Database 12.1c will be a "columnar, compressed, high-speed, in-memory database," Ellison said during Oracle's quarterly earnings call Thursday. "One reason I was confident SAP HANA could never compete with Oracle was because of 12.1c."
In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal – NYTimes.com – I don’t think you’ll ever replace human judgment and human inspiration and creativity because, at the end of the day, you need to be asking questions like, O.K., the system says this. Is this really what we want to do? Is that the right thing?
Application Resilience in a Service-oriented Architecture – Programming – Engineering resilience into an application is critical to achieving fault and latency tolerance. Operational considerations and support by client applications are equally important. These principles can be applied in many different ways and approaches will differ by language, technology stack, and personal preference but hopefully our experiences, and perhaps even our open source software, can inspire improved resilience in your systems.
Nginx for Developers: An Introduction – After struggling with it myself for a bit, I finally got down the basics of how to work with nginx, and wanted to share it so that other developers would have an easier time picking it up.
Confessions of a Ruby Developer Whose Heart was Stolen by Scala – Confessions of a Ruby Developer Whose Heart was Stolen by Scala
Using Native APIs in Sencha Desktop Packager | Blog | Sencha – Sencha Desktop Packager lets you to take an existing web application and deploy it as a desktop application. You can also integrate with the native platform by using additional APIs to create menus, show file dialogs, and access the file system. In this bl
Deploy Java Apps With Docker = Awesome | Atlassian Blogs – What I liked about Docker is how responsive and quick it is and the insta-repeatability that it delivers. Spawning up a new container takes literally the same time it takes to run the command on bare metal. It’s a joy to behold!
Review: 4 free, open source management GUIs For MongoDB – In this article, we'll examine four open source MongoDB GUI management tools:
11 hot improvements to Java EE 7 – InfoWorld – HTML5, simplified JMS, an updated Web Profile — Java Enterprise Edition 7 lays the foundation for a more cloud-centric Java
Using Hibernate Frameworks: What Are the Best Practices? – In this post, I want to focus on Hibernate and which best practices you should follow when using it in your Java EE application.

Links for April 9th through April 15th

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Vinny

The Netflix Tech Blog: HTML5 Video at Netflix – Today, we’re excited to talk about proposed extensions to HTML5 video that enable playback of premium video content on the web.
Scaling Pinterest – From 0 to 10s of Billions of Page Views a Month in Two Years – Architecture is doing the right thing when growth can be handled by adding more of the same stuff. You want to be able to scale by throwing money at a problem which means throwing more boxes at a problem as you need them. If you are architecture can do that, then you’re golden.
Mobile hybrid frameworks are not all alike There are actually two flavors of hybrid-ness — hybrid-web and hybrid-native. Comparing PhoneGap and Marmalade shows the difference. – PhoneGap and the rest of the hybrid-web frameworks are good at producing informational apps. These apps can look beautiful and certainly can have some compelling features like tight integration with social networks and geo-tracking, for example. But they’re inadequate for games and still lack a rich user experience when compared to more native apps like Flipboard or AngryBirds.
Apple’s Dominance, in One Chart – Corporate Intelligence – WSJ – On the left, share of global handset sales by unit. In the middle, revenues for the industry. On the right, profits. There is very little money to be made in being anything but Apple or Samsung right now.
Kaggle: Go from Big Data to Big Analytics – Go from Big Data to Big Analytics – 88,044 of the world's best data scientists working on your problem.
Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design – As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.)
How to work with software engineers – by Ken Norton #humor – today I will share with you my Ten-Step Plan for Working With Engineers. Or more to the point: how to make engineers do what you tell them to do.
High Frequency and Algorithmic trading, research and design – HFT is a small project with a big ambition. We aim to build the worlds best algorithmic trading platform using the best off-the-shelf open source technology stack to be found. And all of this on a tight budget.
Hypercritical: Code Hard or Go Home – Given these graphs, and knowing the history between Apple and Google over the past decade, one of two things seemed inevitable: either Google was going to become the new de facto “owner” of WebKit development, or it was going to create its own fork of WebK
Software Leadership #4: Slow Down to Speed Up – Building a quality-focused team isn't easy. But creating a culture that slows down to do the right thing, while simultaneously moving fast, provides an enormous competetive advantage. It's not as common as you might think.
Groovy & Grails for Java Developers – Peter Ledbrook shows how Groovy can be useful for writing scripts, unit tests or builds for Spring projects and how Grails simplifies web application development.
Re-imagining the Browser with AngularJS – Miško Hevery demoes using AngularJS to create dynamic web applications using reusable components.
Cisco taps Microsoft’s Cloud OS for new datacenter portfolio | ZDNet – Cisco and Microsoft have teamed up on a series of new datacenter ventures designed to simplify cloud deployments. Based on Microsoft's Cloud OS, the suite of solutions rely on the combination of Cisco's Unified Data Center architecture with Microsoft's Fa
15 Programming Skills Most Coveted By Employers – ReadWrite – So what skills are the most sought after? That's an ever-fluctuating, somewhat difficult thing to track. Normally, we'd avoid turning to a single source for such data, but its very nature makes Indeed.com an ideal place to look. The job search site aggregates more than 16 million listings from a wide range of sources, so it's fairly comprehensive.
Tutorial: How to make an offline HTML5 web app, FT style | FT Labs – n this tutorial we will build two versions of an offline website in order to demonstrate how to add functionality to an existing offline website in such a way that existing users won’t get left behind using an old version.
Objective-C’s dip in popularity tied to decline in iPad and iPhone | Application Development – InfoWorld – Objective-C, best known as the programming language used for building applications to run on Apple's popular iPad and iPhone devices, is beginning to level off in popularity, one monthly assessment of languages reports
Appcache Facts – The application cache is a poorly understood part of the HTML5 specification with a lot of potential. Let's get rid of some of the confusion and make the web a faster place.
Introducing the OpenStack Activity Board » The OpenStack Blog – I am pleased to announce that a beta release of the OpenStack Activity Board (beta) is now live. The development Activity Board announced few months ago provides a visual overview of all the OpenStack public activity of community members across multiple dimensions: contributors and organizations, projects and tools
Key Insights from Cisco’s Latest Research on the “Network Software Evolution” – So to minimize confusion, for a new study conducted by Cisco we decided to come up with an all-encompassing term to summarize all of the above ? the Network Software Evolution (NSE).
Sencha Touch 2.2 RC Notes – I’ve spent the last couple of days porting apps over to 2.2 RC. This post is about the issues I’ve come across, and some general thoughts on the framework’s changes.
IntelliJ IDEA :: Out-of-the-box IDE for Spring Development – IntelliJ IDEA brings outstanding code assistance and productivity-boosting features for development Spring applications with Web Services, Data JPA, Security, Web Flow, MVC, AOP, Roo, Integration and Dynamic Modules.
Getting Started with Android Development – IntelliJ IDEA – Confluence – An Android application is a Java program written against the Java SDK and Android SDK. An integrated development environment (IDE) for any kind of Java applications, IntelliJ IDEA automates and streamlines all required steps that go from writing the source
We need a data democracy, not a data dictatorship – There are few companies that helped spur the democratization of data over the past few years more than Tableau. It has become the face of the next-generation business intelligence software thanks to its ease of use and focus on appealing visualization, and its free public software has found avid users even among relative data novices like myself.

Links for February 11th through February 15th

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Vinny

Boxen is your team’s IT robot. It’s a dangerously opinionated framework that automates every piece of your development environment. – Boxen is a framework for managing almost every aspect of your Mac. We built a massive standard library of Puppet modules optimized for Boxen to manage everything from running MySQL to installing Minecraft.
A New Java Library for Amazing Productivity | Javalobby – Personally, I think this library is a godsend, and I think there’ll be a LOT of teams picking it up over the next five years, just like the popularity of Spring has swept the globe due to all the efficiencies it bestows on developers. The library, by the w
Raible Designs | The Modern Java Web Developer and Java Web Security at Denver JUG – The first talk, The Modern Java Web Developer, was inspired by the book titled The Well-Grounded Java Developer. Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg mention in the beginning of the book that they wrote it as a training guide to get new Java developers up to spee
The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story – This four-minute video gives you a quick overview of Sencha Fastbook, and shows you a side-by-side comparison of how well our HTML5 app performs against both the native iOS and the native Android Facebook apps (versions 5.2 and 1.9.12 respectively, the latest available when we made this video on December 10th).
Promoting iOS Apps with Smart App Banners – Safari has a new Smart App Banner feature in iOS 6 and later that provides a standardized method of promoting apps on the App Store from a website. <meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=myAppStoreID>
How Lockheed Martin’s ‘Kill Chain’ Stopped SecurID Attack – Dark Reading – A rare inside look at how the defense contractor repelled an attack using its homegrown 'Cyber Kill Chain' framework
Plivo Cloud – Cloud Platform to Build Voice & SMS Applications (Voice & SMS API Platform) – Build powerful Telephony Apps. Leave the Infrastructure plumbing to Us.
apiary.io — REST API documentation, Reimagined – It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.
Love the idea that my next car has a REST API! Go Tesla – An unofficial documentation of the Tesla Model S REST API
Cloud 66 | Code to Cloud in 5 minutes – Build your own Rails PaaS – The easiest way to get your code hosted on your servers. Provision, deploy and manage your Ruby on Rails apps on your cloud or your own servers.
Gartner Positions Tableau as a Leader in 2013 Magic Quadrant – Tableau is a "Leader" for first time in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report.
VMware Marching Towards Software Defined Datacenter with Software Defined Storage Acquisition of Virsto | SiliconANGLE – As part of its strategy to deliver the software-defined datacenter, VMware continues to invest and innovate to extend the benefits of virtualization to every domain in the datacenter — compute, network, storage and the associated security and availability
Bill Gates did a AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit – Feb 11 2013 – Bill Gates did a AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit and here is the transcript.
The Porsche 911: An ode to iteration (via @daringfireball) – 50 years of iterative refinement.
Developing Java Apps for iOS–Codenameone, An Interview – Develop in Java, deploy on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. What is codenameone? An interview with Chen Fishbein.
Building Twitter Bootstrap · An A List Apart Article – Thanks to the foresight and focus of a small group of designers and developers, we were able to evolve our development process, build an extensive front-end toolkit, and help thousands of others bootstrap the projects they love
Infotron Spreadsheet Analyzer – Breviz, the Spreadsheet Visualization Tool reveals the hidden logic of a spreadsheet, to help you spot errors and make your spreadsheets less risky and more efficient.
IntelliJ IDEA 12 Wins Jolt Award for Coding Tools 2013! | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We are excited to announce that a few days ago IntelliJ IDEA 12 was named the winner of the Jolt Award for Coding Tools 2013, an annual award run by Dr. Dobbs to showcase the best IDEs and coding tools of the year.
Apple iTunes becomes much more than a "break-even" business. – iTunes now is a blend of many business models. Some, like music, use a wholesale revenue recognition method and have very low to zero margins, others, like eBooks and Apps, are sold using an “agency” revenue model with potentially higher margins and some, like Software, are recognized at full value with very high margins.

Links for December 12th through December 15th

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Vinny

Deploy Web Apps to CloudBees from IntelliJ IDEA 12 | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – In case you didn’t know, the new release of IntelliJ IDEA comes with deployment tools for CloudBees, a rapidly growing cloud platform for Java applications. At the moment IntelliJ IDEA allows you to connect to your CloudBees account and view/manage deployed applications.
Tuts+ Premium Course: Perfect Workflow in Sublime Text 2 – I’m a confessed code editor addict, and have tried them all! I was an early adopter of Coda, a TextMate advocate, even a Vim convert. But all of that changed when I discovered Sublime Text 2, the best code editor available today. Don’t believe me? Let me convince you in this course.
Working as a Software Developer – I recently gave a presentation on what it is like to work as a software developer to first-year engineering students at KTH taking an introductory programming course. I wanted to give my view on the main differences between professional software development and programming for a university course.
HTML, Javascript and the app-ification of the Web – The post described in a nutshell what might be one of the most powerful trends in Web app design — the move from multipage Web applications to single page applications driven by javascript and access to a powerful API.
Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers – The first step in becoming an effective programmer is to ensure that you are spending your time wisely. And there is no greater waste of time than in working on something that is not useful or never shipped.
Scaling GitHub – I’ll dig into our development workflow and how we address concepts like scaling, deployment, code review, and testing. It also presents some interesting business challenges, too. How you grow your company from three employees, how you work in teams, and how you split your app up into services all help ensure that you’ll be able to react to your product’s growth.
Innovating for Growth | Innovation 2.0: a spiral approach to business model innovation – The Economist and Ernst and Young collaborate on a discussion forum to talk about innovation.
Goldman Sachs: Microsoft has gone from 97 percent share of compute market to 20 percent | Microsoft Pri0 | The Seattle Times – According to the report, Microsoft's operating systems have gone from 97 percent of all computing devices in 2000 — back when desktop and laptop PCs were dominant — to 20 percent expected in 2012 — when PCs, tablets and smartphones are all part of the computing-device picture.
Creating Native Applications with Sencha Desktop Packager – Sencha Desktop Packager is a new product, included with the Sencha Complete: Team bundle, which enables you to take your existing Ext JS web application and package it as a native desktop application. From here, you may deliver your application to your customers who are running Windows and Mac OS X.
EMC follows VMware, rest of world into OpenStack – With the storage leader now formally aboard the OpenStack Foundation, it’s almost easier to count the IT vendors who have not climbed aboard this open-source cloud bandwagon
Query Mongo: MySQL to Mongo Query Translator – Query Translator – Convert MySQL Queries to MongoDB Syntax
WebLogic Examples: Wiki: Home – The purpose of this project is to share Java EE examples for WebLogic with the Java EE and WebLogic user communities. This project was started by Oracle Product management, but we encourage you to submit your own examples.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Tag Archives: management