So I’m in the midst of planning my next toy project, specifically with an aim to build something for the cloud, be it Google App Engine, Mor.ph, EC2, etc. (that part is still up for grabs). What I’d like to do is an opt-in blog aggregation site focused around functional programming. It would be very [...]

Joel Neely started a series of posts over the weekend detailing a proposed exploration of what Functional Programming means “to me as a practicing OO software developer?” The task at hand is to look at the generation of Data Transfer Objects which include a static inner class that functions as a builder. Since I’m exploring [...]

If you’ve ever worked with the brilliant Recaptcha service, you’ll know that their REST API requires an HTTP POST rather than a GET. As I had only used GET requests thus far, I googled around and found a pretty easy solution:

private def evaluateCaptcha(def remoteIp, def challenge, def response) {
def config = [...]

Ever wanted to do drag-n-drop sorting of a grid of images on a page and persist it? Here’s my solution using Grails, Prototype, and Script.aculo.us.
Basically what prompted this was the need for my wife to be able to sort the various product images that she had on a screen at any given time in [...]

Alex Miller’s Twitter background inspired me to generate a Wordle from my feed. How fitting that “Code” is more prominent than anything.

; Hello World!
(defn hello [name]
(println “Hello, ” name))

(hello “World!”)

A few days ago I pontificated on my need to choose a new “Language of the Year.” Right now I’m attempting to choose between Scala and Clojure. If nothing else, I’ve learned from this exercise that asking the community for feedback is a GOOD thing. Your comments have been very helpful.
To summarize:

As far as the [...]

In 2007 I established several professional development goals (and later reported my progress on these), one of which was to learn Groovy and Grails. This goal stemmed from the continually referenced idea from The Pragmatic Programmer to “learn a new language every year.” This idea has become so ubiquitous that it even has it’s own [...]

I recently gave a 90 minute talk at work covering quite a bit of ground related to Agile Software Development. If I had to sum up agile development in one word, it would be FEEDBACK. Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt give one of the best definitions of agile I’ve ever seen in their book, Practices [...]

I didn’t have one this year, but Expedia did. Check it out!