compliance
Posted on Become a Better Developer

Developer’s Guide to Compliance

With the recent start date of GDPR and all of the related emails you are likely receiving, compliance is on my mind.  Although every form of compliance is slightly different, there are common steps we developers can take to help our customers.  This article will go more into consulting than a typical developer may need to drift.  However, these steps may help you look more senior to your bosses than you are. Compliance Goals The first thing to learn about any form compliance is the primary goal (or goals) of the requirements.  When you determine this, you can understand the spirit of the compliance as well as the letter of the rules.  The spirit part of the requirements is essential to... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Podcast

Development Language Families and Leveraging Them

As we continue our overview of IT and development languages, in particular, we examine the idea of development language families.  This includes how those can impact our ability to quickly adapt to a new environment. Modern Development Language Families The good news about this concept is that the most popular modern languages fall into only a few categories of families.  Thus, once you have even one or two under your belt, it can be a short trip to ramp up to a new language or environment.  The programming language concepts you see in any given language will tend to be consistent.  Better yet, even the syntax will start to become familiar. Improve Your Career in Small Steps The key to using... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Podcast

Creating A Productive Workspace and The Happiness it Provides

Your job may dictate your workspace and environment.  However, you likely have at least a little say in the way that space is configured.  Also, your side hustle workspace or home office can be configured to your personal style and situation.  Although it may seem minor, a productive workspace is important to your mental and physical health. A Productive Workspace Is Focused When you build a home office the area you use is a critical part of whether it can be productive or not.  Distractions exist in every environment.  However, the more you can reduce the impact of these, the better it will be for your focus.  This includes the ability to shut a door, when needed, and put away... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Podcast

Building a Personal Brand Across A Wide Range of Social Platforms

One of the benefits of the popularity of social networks is that we can build a personal brand and reach a broad audience.  We can open our target market up to the world and are not limited to our city, state, or country.  It is tempting (and common) to have a presence on several platforms rather than restrict our reach.  Yes, there is overlap, but why not reach as far as possible when these sites are free to use. A Consistent Voice The challenge with all of these social networking sites is that we need to have the same message and presentation of our brand on all of them.  This hurdle is only made more difficult but us adding a site... Read more

apache ant
Posted on Become a Better Developer

Apache Ant – A Crash Course

The Apache project has a large number of highly useful and popular projects.  These range from platforms to languages to tools and utilities.  In this tutorial, we take a look at Apache Ant.  This scripting language and its library of tasks are far more powerful than you might expect. A Focus on Software Development Apache Ant is best used as a build and deployment tool.  As such, the core tasks include the type of actions you expect for this phase of development.  There are tasks to compile, compress, move and update files as well as some for testing and pushing database updates.  However, like all Apache projects, this is a living tool that has been updated to work with the latest trends... Read more

amazon guard duty
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Guard Duty: Threat Detection for the Cloud

As we have progressed through the tour of AWS services and tools we have seen reasons to expand our cloud presence.  This can be a security concern, but they also provide some excellent security tools.  That brings us to Amazon Guard Duty.  This service offers threat detection for your services, connections, and data. Amazon Guard Duty: Quick and Easy Monitoring Anyone who has tried to set up monitoring and threat detection knows that it usually requires some installation and a lot of configuration.  That is one of the best features of this service.  It can be turned on and off without worrying about the deployment.  It also runs without a need to fear that it will degrade your systems.  In a... Read more