RESTful web services are a thing I love to discuss, build, and use. However, most of them stop short at sending JSON (or XML) back and forth over the wire. I read the documentation. I write some code with URLs in it and tie my JavaScript, Python, or PHP right into the vendor’s API as it’s currently structured. Any changes ...

Upgrading software is much harder than it could be. Modern versioning schemes and package managers have the ability to help us upgrade much more than they do today. Take for example my post on Upgrading to Rails 5 Beta — The Hard Way. Most of the time was spent trying to find all the different libraries my app was using ...

Tables are one of the things that we use extensively in our everyday life for a number of reasons. They are easy to understand and help us manipulate our data by putting everything into rows and columns. If you’re keen on notebooks, you just draw the tables in them. If you want them on your website? You code them in, ...

When you wish to improve your programming knowledge, choosing the next course you’ll follow on platforms such as Udacity, Coursera or Udemy is exciting. All the courses descriptions promises that you’ll learn great new skills you can use to build cool projects and to improve your career. It’s also very easy to get started by just pressing a button. When ...

I found a plethora of articles on how to build a Sitecore project and get to its infamous welcome page. I could create data templates and content and even workflows, but I found myself confused on how everything fit together. Placeholders, renderings, layouts, sublayouts, Oh My! In an effort to learn Sitecore MVC, I decided to build a small website ...

Counting distinct values is a trivial matter with small datasets, but it gets dramatically harder for streams with millions of distinct points. Absolute counting accuracy can be attained through a set, but then you have the undesirable tradeoff of linear memory growth. What you really want when dealing with enormous datasets is something with predictable storage and performance characteristics. That ...

Why is it such a joy to work with Stripe or Shopify as a developer? It could be for a number of reasons, but one of them is surely that they have great documentation. For these companies, documentation isn’t an afterthought — it’s something you can tell that they obviously spend a lot of time and resources on. Why is ...

In this article we’ll be providing in-depth information on how to become a Web Developer. Well, I don’t have to tell you that web development is one of the most exciting fields in the world right now. For a career that has only been around for twenty years or less, it has not only been a major field of interest, ...

Working toward a goal is easy if you’re just starting out and everything is fresh and new. For short-term goals such as learning a new programming language, reading a book or completing a course, it’s not hard to see it through if it really matters to you. You just need to follow the process and you can reach the end ...