How many times have you gazed upon the list of services that Amazon is providing through their Amazon Web Services (AWS) family of products and felt an unpleasant mixture of anxiety and confusion? ...

Downloading the latest Ubuntu release and installing it on your laptop or in a virtual machine is easy, but maybe it’s too easy. It’s too easy to blindly accept the choices that the distribution ha...

I know what you’re thinking: “what constitutes ‘real life’ integration testing (IT)?” In my opinion, “real life” means “complicated web application” or maybe “web app that is stuck to creaky databa...

A couple of months ago I was working with another developer, he was building a web application around a web service that I had just finished writing. We were going over the API documentation that I...

I knew that I hard written a crappy web service API but why was it so crappy? Was it because, no matter what, it only returned JSON data? Was it because the arguments were passed via their positi...

I’m sure you’ve heard a variation on this story before… So I have this web crawler and it generates these super-detailed log files, which is great ‘cause then we know what it's doing but ...

I do a lot of Java coding and I enjoy it. I admit that there is a lot of typing, often a lot of boilerplate and getting even simple tasks done can involve too much work. Most of the tools that try ...

I don't want to waste time explaining why I use Emacs all day, every day, and eschew more traditional development environments. Either you already use Emacs and I'm preaching to the choir or you do...