Recent Articles
Don’t stand around with your hands in your pockets
I was reminded of this story while working with a team of engineers struggling to find their place on a new contract. They wanted to be told exactly what to do and how to do it.
OneNote Shortcuts
I must be soaring to new levels of personal growth now that I'm using OneNote as opposed to a good old text editor. Moving quickly is key to getting the most value out of this program. Here's my workflow and shortcuts.
(Book) The ONE Thing
Create an ambitious timeboxed ONE Thing goal. View this goal as a giant dominio that needs to be knocked down. Stack smaller and smaller dominos in front of it, to help knock it down.
(Book) The Wealthy Freelancer
A good practical resource for getting into freelancing. Most of the books out there on consulting and freelancing are missing the details on how to really get started in the field.
(Book) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Drive attempts to present a progressive view of motivation. The systems of reward and punishment may have worked in the past, but if we are to find lasting satisfaction in our lives, then it will be necessary to pay attention to the internal motivators of it.
Java to XSD Example
Here's the scenario. You've just built a nice fancy endpoint and you're asking other groups to consume it. Problem is your data model is complex and posting a big messy object is tedious and difficult. You could move your data model outside your app, but that still locks them to whatever language you've written.
A Timeline of My Favorite Books
I've always wanted to create a timeline of all the books I've read. I suspect if you plotted out the turning points in my life, you might find a coorliation to what I was reading at the time.
Understanding Oracle Indexes
As a tech lead I see lots of confusion around indexes. They're really not complicated, here is quick rundown.
Mount S3 to Mac
Steps to mount an S3 bucket to your personal computer.
Web Scrape Examples
Over the years, I've built a collection of small scripts that I use to crawl and fetch data for myself. These are all pretty hacky and quick, but I often find useful.
Kibana Quick Searches
I don't know what's wrong with my brain, but I struggle with the formatting for Kibana searches. Here's are some quick examples.
Aquire and Inspect Java Thread Dumps
A thread dump is a useful way of peaking into a live application. It's a starting point for hunting down a large number of issues include stuck threads and deadlocks.
Aquire and Inspect Java Memory Dumps
Here are some straighforward steps for aquiring a memory dump and simple tools for inspecting. This method works well best because the tools needed are packaged right with the JDK. Great if you find yourself with memory issues or stuck threads on a remote server.
Configure MySql to listen on all ports with Homebrew
I use a piece of software at work that only seems to work on Windows. It interacts with a database that I also connect to on my Mac. By default Homebrew appears to launch mysql with it listening only on localhost. Long story short it appears I set it start automatically start by configuring Launch Agent.
Java Certs - PKIX path building failed
My current contract has tight network restrictions. Users need to install a certificate on their machine in order to access the internet. While developing, it appeared that Java doesn't use the OS keystore
SVN Clean Local Copy
If you're still working in SVN you're life is busy enough as it is. Sometimes I need to be sure my local copy of the code, looks just like the remote copy.
Run a balanced application in a Docker Swarm
Here's a quick and dirty guide to getting a Docker Swarm cluster up and running. Let's create 3 virtual machines our on local machine to help illustrate this.
Gradle Introduction Notes
Here's my notes from this excellent introduction to Gradle. Most of the project I work with use maven, but I'm seeing gradle more and more. These notes help me quickly get my brain back up to speed.
Understanding SQL Group By, Like a Boss...
The group by clause allows you to return one row for a column that might have duplicates. For instance if you groups all the member_ids in a post table together you could perfom some kind of calculation on them. How many there are, tally up a column for them, etc.
VirtualBox Oracle Scratchpad
Getting shared folders and all that jazz is pretty important if you're going to be using virtualbox reguarly. These are my EXTREMLY rough notes on this so far. Expect this to be changed and cleaned up.