D3 Enter and Exit Concept
D3 is so awesome. The other day a friend showed me Spotify Serendipity project, which used D3, and I was floored by the beauty of how visual data can show so much. A picture is truly worth more than a thousand words.
Performance Tuning in Grails 2.4.x: Part 2
Design Begins With Concept
Creating Something Out Of Nothing
The task of creating something out of nothing is perhaps the most challenging aspect of a designer’s job. Beginning a new project can elicit apprehension about how to proceed and feel intimidating. It is comparable to a writer sitting at their desk, staring at a blank page, waiting for that inspirational first word or sentence to come forth.
Performance Tuning in Grails 2.4.x: Part 1
Over the weekend I made performance optimizations to an internal web app that we use for time tracking and invoicing. The app runs on tomcat and is built using grails 2.4.2. Grails 2.4 included some major changes including asset pipelining. This is the first time I’ve tuned a grails app, and I had to do quite a bit of web crawling in order to find my way. I thought I would share some of the helpful tips I encountered, parts of the configuration I used, as well as some dead ends that could waste your time.
Coding Styles and Standards
One of the main reasons for having coding standards is to keep your code readable by everyone. By enforcing standards and formatting, the code base becomes consistent, and anyone can easily understand the structure of the code because he will be more familiar with what to expect. It is also very useful when a new developer joins the team because once he is familiar with the patterns, he will be able to easily read the existing code, which results in a more pleasant experience.
Code and Biology
As science and software advances, we have the ability to fuse the two together to discover and treat diseases in the hopes of prolonging life. Tasks like sequencing the human genome, isolating genetic markers, and handling large amounts of data are now all possible through a scientific field called Bioinformatics – the study and process of biological data through software, engineering, and mathematics.
Objective-C…it’s not you…it’s Swift
At the lastest Apple WWDC conference, Apple decided to suprise it’s developers with introducing a brand new language called Swift which will be used going forward in development all Mac and iOS applications. The good news for all Apple developers is that it is totally integratable with all existing Objective-C code. Another great positive for developers is that it also runs on the current version of iOS, iOS-7. Developers will still need to wait for Xcode-6 to come out of Beta before they can submit full Swift apps, but they will not require everyone to be running the latest iOS.
Who Will Win the World Cup? A Method to Predict the Future
Several weeks ago I tried to predict who would win the World Cup. I faced this interesting problem I want to share: how can we relate the outcome of the World Cup with the strength of the teams? Let me explain it better: How can we account for the fact that some “lucky” teams play easier matches than others and thus most likely will arrive to a better stage?
Writing Awesome CLI Tools in Ruby: Part II
This is Part II of my series on writing awesome CLI (command line interface) tools using ruby (Part I). In the first part I described how to create your project layout, add an executable binary, and get started. In this next part I will cover:
- How to structure your code to be usable as both a tool and a library
- Building your CLI frontend to your library.