Friday, May 22, 2015

Berkeley CS61B - Data structures

I hadn't ventured into the open courseware realm for a while, and I've wanted to get a bit of formal education on data structures and algorithms for a while, so I finally took the plunge a couple weeks ago and started 61B.  For quick reference, here are the relevant locations:

Course Website
Course Lectures
Big O Cheatsheet
Wikipeadia articles on data structures.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Experimenting with Jenkins, ReviewBoard, and Redmine on Azure

As the developers at work finished up the last loose ends on the Programming Standards we were tasked with creating at work, one of the last things we talked about was how to enforce the standards.  This led to a discussion of code reviews, and I went down the rabbit hole, going so far as to read SmartBear's free 150 page ebook on the subject.  I thought it was a great approach but it seemed that in order to really get the most out of it, you needed a tool.  I wanted to play around with something, so I began looking into what was available for free, and ended up going down a bit of a different rabbit hole: continuous integration.  I wanted to see how Jenkins, ReviewBoard, and Redmine could work together to act as a suite of tools for agile development.  So I spun up some Ubuntu 14.04 instances on my Azure account, and away I went...

Udacity Course: Developing Scalable Apps in Java

My new position focuses on cloud development, with an emphasis on Google App Engine.  I wanted to get up and running quickly, so I worked through this course from Udacity.  Prior to this course, I'd only worked on one other App Engine project, which was basically an expansion on the Google Backend API Walkthrough.  I'd previously used the Google Plugin for Eclipse, however this project uses the App Engine maven plugin, so that was different.  Overall I thought it was a good course.  Naturally, nothing involving Eclipse can go smoothly the first time, but after a couple hiccups, I was off and running.