08.03.13

What Most Schools Don’t Teach…

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 9:44 pm by Liv

If you work in IT, you have probably by now have seen the famous video on YouTube labelled “What most schools don’t teach” — where Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and a few other prominent figures are talking about how easy it is to program, and how only 10% of the USA schools teach programming. It goes on more to bombard the viewer with some scary figures about how 1,000,000 jobs or more will go unfilled because there are not enough coders — I’m guessing as a motivational message to inspire people (kids?) to start programming.

The thing is, watching the video, I cannot but cringe at the hypocrisy employed in making this video! If the purpose of this message is to increase education efforts (at school level or individually) in the programming sector, then I’d say it probably does it job — in a very lame way, but it sort of does. If however this is intended to be a call to arms for “everyone” to start programming and either change their jobs to a programming job or if they are at the beginning of their career, to set their career path to be in programming, then I’d say the message is a hypocritical one. Even worse, it is setting up the targeted audience for a harsh comedown!

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

Disclaimer

20.12.12

Of Java and Assembler

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 6:04 pm by Liv

The title would no doubt puzzle quite a few of you — after all I’m putting in the same sentence a low-level, processor-specific language (for no better term for “assembler” — I know, I know, I know, “it’s not really a language”, right?) with a rather high-level, even platform-independent language like Java. So, right away you’d all be asking yourself “well, what can they have in common?” — or probably thinking that this is an article looking at how far apart these 2 languages are. The thing is, they’re not actually that far apart! Yup, I’m going to say that again and re-phrase is so the purpose of this post becomes more clear: they are quite similar in fact!

Now, I bet this got your attention, didn’t it ? Rest assured, I didn’t just say it for the sake of it — I will try to explain throughout this post how that is possible. And if you decide to read it all, and happen to work within the JVM space, I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this — either via a comment here or simply drop me a line.

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

Disclaimer

20.08.12

Note to Self on Being a Coder

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 7:46 pm by Liv

There’s no point in hiding the fact that quite for a while I’ve been dealing with a few rather messy projects — and in doing so, together with others working on these, I have found come across all sorts of shenanigans and oddities (caused quite often by myself and not just the others) which, with a bit of fore-thought and a bit of “voice of experience”, I feel could have been avoided. As such, what follows is just a random set of thoughts on various coding and IT-related matters from yours truly (the angry mob — as The Kaiser Chiefs have put it )

I suggest you put together a similar one, if you’re a coder yourself, and revisit it often — being reminded occasionally of the simplest things does seem to help! And when you’re buried deep in the guts of a complex project, you quite likely won’t remember all of these — having them “there” in front of you, I found it helps…

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink 2 Comments

Disclaimer

04.03.12

RMISockFactory — New Open Source Project Started on SourceForge

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 9:22 pm by Liv

I thought I’d post this on my blog as well since this seems to get a lot of attention nowadays (it certainly seems to get a lot of visitors!).

I just started a new open-source project on SourceForge.net — I know you github fans will jump at my throat for using sf.net and not github, but I’m being pragmatic here: I’m still learning my git commands and way of operating, whereas I’m very comfortable with subversion so rather than spending countless hours each day trying to figure out how to merge in changes in git, I thought I’d go with what I know and spend my time on actual coding rather than admin! Makes sense?

Anyway, the reason for this post is because I need some help with the project (as it’s always the case with open source) so I thought I’d raise awareness to my readers of this — who knows? one of you guys might lend a helping hand?

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

Disclaimer

20.01.12

Maven Checkstyle Plugin — Usage

Posted in Blogroll, Tech at 1:11 am by Liv

The title might not be the best, I’ll give you this, however, having just spent some time trying to get Checkstyle to run in the site phase of one of my maven projects I have figured out that a lot of the resources you find out there miss out a few important details. So if you are looking for the complete usage guide of the Maven Checkstyle plugin, this post isn’t what you’re looking for. However, if just like me you found yourself adding the configuration example given on the Maven Checkstyle plugin and then issuing a mvn site only to find out that Checkstyle plugin doesn’t kick in, then this is post is probably for you.

I’m not going to show you here how to configure your Checkstyle rules but rather what you need to include in your pom.xml to actually get the Checkstyle plugin to generate the reports when you issue a mvn site.

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink 1 Comment

Disclaimer