Having been a web developer for over 20 years, I’ve gone through a lot of tools and IDEs over the years. As 2019 kicks off, I thought I would document my current development environment for anyone who’s interested in what I use. As a note, I mainly work with PHP using the Laravel framework, JavaScript writing Riot and Vue components and deploy to a WebFaction cloud server.
I’m sure you’ve run into it while trying to learn programming. You find a shiny new tutorial or video course and you dive in with excitement. Finally, this will be the one that sticks.
Here’s a video I put together about Problem Solving. I think this is one of those topics that beginning programmers struggle the most with sometimes and this demonstrates a couple of techniques you can use to help you solve programming problems.
Learning programming to the level of being able to create web applications or work in the field can take a lot of time and effort. But what if you don’t like it? What if you spend all that time and effort and it ends up that you hate programming and never want to see its ugly face again?
Learning programming can often feel like you’re running as fast as you can and getting nowhere fast. The minute you feel like you have something figured out, five more things pop up that you need to learn before you can even do anything useful.
So Strings are built for optimisation, but are you using it in an optimised way? If you understand interning and immutability, you can start looking at ways to use those features to your advantage.
One of the fundamental data types in Java is the String. In fact, it’s used so often that most people don’t even think much about what a String is or how it works. But a String Object works like no other object in Java in two important ways; immutability and internment.
Another blast from the past.
If you’re working with Servlets or in a Threaded environment, you need to be thinking about thread safety.
Thread Bare # Java has built in support for multiple threads in all its objects. The way it handles this, is each thread can get a handle on the object and run its methods at the same time which, for something like a servlet, cuts down on the amount of memory needed to load the servlets and the amount of time needed to instantiate multiple objects. This can be a huge improvement in performance for web-based applications.
Yet another article from the archives. Hope it’s useful.
There is a common Object Oriented axiom that says “Program to the Interface and not to the Implementation”. But what does that mean and why is it useful?
This is an article I wrote a while ago, but is still relevant to many languages still in use. Figured I’d repost it to this blog.
Many of you may have learned the following in Java 101, but I thought I’d repeat it just in case.