VoxBlog

I would like to introduce http://www.WhereDoKidsEatFreeToday.com, my first Google App Engine Site. It is a site that allows you to quickly look up what restaurants near you have free or cheap kids’ meals for a given day.  I created it because I am both cheap and forgetful, and because I had been looking for an excuse to try out Google app engine.

If you are interested, it took about 600 lines of Python code and about 400 lines of HTML.  If I wrote the Python code as “real” Python code it would have been about 400 lines and much … Continue Reading

If you didn’t get what you wanted for the holidays and are looking to buy a little something more for yourself, consider Clean Code by Robert Martin et al.

I finished reading it this past weekend, and think that it is a book everyone should read.  As a developer, you spend your whole day reading code, the least you can do is teach yourself how to write it well.

Plus, if you loan it to your co-workers, it may well be the best gift you could ever get.

At work we recently hired a couple .Net developers and are busily converting them to Java developers.  During my “what makes a good developer isn’t how well they know the syntax and libraries” and “you need to use the right tools for the job” speeches, I realized how long it has been since I really moved outside my own comfort zone as a developer.

I started life as a Perl coder around 1998 and made the jump to Java in around 2001. I remember how tired I was every night after work, but how great it was to be exposed … Continue Reading

Looking to impress the boss before the upcoming holiday Bonus time? Looking to improve learning across your organization? Did you recently delete valuable data and need to make up for it?

The answer to all these problems is simple: introduce RSS. A recent Forrester report shows that only only 11% of people use an RSS reader, which means that there is a very good chance that the vast majority of people in your company are not RSS users.

To make things easy for you, I have created a sample email you can send to anyone and everyone in … Continue Reading