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. OS - Xubuntu 18.

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. And then you hit a brick wall. The boredom kicks in and you lose focus on what you’re doing. Soon, you completely lose track of whatever it was that you were supposed to be learning and you stop the course completely, adding it to the growing pile of half finished materials in your bookmarks folder.

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? I hate to say it, but this can happen. I’ve seen it happen.

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. Measuring programming progress is extremely hard to do. It doesn’t come naturally to humans to measure progress of a mental skill. Programming is a very mental skill.

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. How to Waste Memory Without Really Trying Thinking about a String’s immutability, let’s look at String concatenation: String name = getName(); //Returns "Joe" String a = "Welcome "; a += name; a += ", Good to See You.

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. You Can’t Touch This Immutability means that an object can’t be changed. Ever. You can’t modify any of its values in any way.

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.

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? Concrete Shoes Let’s say that we have a class that calculates the number of Strings that begin with S in a list: class Begins { public static int calcBeginsWithS(ArrayList words) { Iterator iter = words.

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. Most of the variables you’ll use in Java are going to be Objects. So in the following code, we’re creating three Objects: BigDecimal number = new BigDecimal("9.