technological advances
Posted on Become a Better Developer

Keeping Up With Technological Advances

We all know that technology moves fast.  That makes it a full-time job just to keep up with the latest technological advances.  Fortunately, there are many ways for us to make keeping up a part of the normal routine.  These avenues are easy to utilize and are an excellent way to save yourself time. Trade Magazines and Blog Sites I have mentioned these before.  However, you can get a wealth of information by perusing magazines, blogs, and podcasts.  The best part about these sources of information is that you can skim or pay partial attention to them while still getting a benefit.  This happens to be a reason why articles that are in list form (top three this, never do... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on A Summary Of Amazon Services

The Amazon Migration Services

In this episode, we look at the migration group of services.  We have already discussed a few of these and will focus on the ones that are new to us.  These services are the Migration Hub, Application Discovery,  and the Application Migration Service. We looked at the database migration service and the “snow” family of services in prior episodes.  These make it easy to move a database to the cloud or large amounts of data.  The “snow” (ball, edge, mobile) services make it easy to move data without using all your network pipe for hours, days, or weeks. Migration Hub – Your Dashboard The number of us that will need to migrate a large number of servers out to the cloud... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Free and Low Cost Tools

Code Review and Analysis Tools (Free and Low-Cost)

There have been a lot of excellent free and low-cost reviewed already.  However, this week we continue our “shopping” with a look at code review and analysis applications.  This used to be an area where all of the solutions were pricey.  Fortunately, SAAS options, improved automation, and well-defined best practices (with a touch of open source) have made these affordable.  Yes, even the individual developer can find affordable options. Keep It Cheap There are a lot of great tools available in this area that also have a high price tag.  We will skip those this time as we want to focus on options for small teams down to individuals.  I have found these useful even in little applications like the one created in Season... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Patterns of Software Design

Software Patterns – The Builder

In this episode, we look at the Builder pattern.  This one is another creational pattern that helps us construct the class instances for our application.  It is another pattern that could be skipped through brute-force and a wide range of constructors, but I think you will see this is a much better approach. The Builder Defined It helps to start with the “Gang of Four” definition and then we will dig into that. Separate the construction of a complex object from its representation so that the same construction process can create different representations. This is a pattern that I think we can all easily buy into.  When you have a class that is more than a few values, and it has actual... Read more

development languages
Posted on Become a Better Developer

Learning Development Languages – A Roadmap

One of the easily recognized ways to become a better developer is the act of learning development languages.  We all know that new tools show up regularly and force us to add new skills or become obsolete.  Although it is important to add new skills due to technological advancements, there are also existing tools that we need to learn. Create a Roadmap A task of this scale needs a plan.  That will make it easier to track progress and find paths that achieve the goal with the most efficiency.  Learning development languages is a task that can be greatly improved by looking at similarities between them.  There is also a financial benefit to mapping out new skills that are in... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on A Summary Of Amazon Services

AWS Database Services – Relational to Big Data

The AWS database group of services is positioned to cover any need you have for storing and accessing data.  We have looked at files and general storage.  These services are more specific and are true database solutions Aurora The popularity of MySQL and PostgreSQL was recognized by Amazon.  Thus, they saw that a high-speed solution that was compatible with those SQL platforms was going to be worthwhile.  They have made it easy and cost-effective to spin up an Aurora instance.  I highly recommend you take a look at it for your needs.  The setup alone will reduce your headaches even while providing enterprise-class availability and backups. The Classics You may want to stick to a database engine you know.  That is ok... Read more