Software Developer

This post in Windows Forums and this article by Tom’s Hardware both serve to illustrate an important point – AI excels at searching and understanding context, but is weaker when facing a focused developer who understands the rules of the business domain. AI coding copilots can help developers to get rolling faster, but there is no substitute for a deep understanding of math, algorithms,…

My alma mater recently experienced yet another growth spurt, creating the School of Engineering and Computing. This evolved from the former Physics, Computer Science, and Engineering department, where I currently serve on the Industry Advisory Board as well as a mentor in the SEC Mentorship Program, and where I taught evening classes as an adjunct for 14 years. Today I wanted to ruminate over the…

I’ve been teaching a course on database management systems for about six years now. We cover relational theory, SQL, normalization, MySQL, data modeling, Python, Jupyter, Docker, and PySpark. It’s a great class, and a lot of my students find their way into wonderful careers because of the skills they pick up.

Personally and professionally, I’ve always focused on the low-level, the technical.…

Hire a Senior Developer

Well, folks, this isn’t the post I wanted to be writing.

My employer, Nyla Technology Solutions, is laying off me and two of my coworkers. I am now job-hunting with immediate effect, so to speak.

As a senior software developer, I bring over 25 years of experience in software development and nearly 15 years of experience in teaching graduate and undergraduate-level computer science courses…

iOS Dev Camp DC 2019

Tomorrow morning I brave Washington D.C. traffic to get to iOS Dev Camp DC 2019. And I’m really looking forward to it!

This conference is always a lot of fun. The food is great, the talks are interesting, and the swag is top-shelf. But the thing I really love about iOS Dev Camp DC is the people. We are a smallish group of iOS enthusiasts from all over the country, and every year we have a…

Jobs Available in VA

I have recently learned about a few companies in Chesapeake and Newport News that are looking for tech talent (JEE, .NET, Java, or DevOps). If you are interested in learning more about permanent, full-time positions in southern VA, please send me a DM on any of my social accounts. I will be happy to forward your info to the appropriate recruiters.

Cracking into Rabin Karp

So the Jetpack plugin for WordPress added GIF blocks.

https://giphy.com/embed/9w9Bpoiddg72U Yes it is, Happy Cartoon Guy. Yes it is.

Solving coding puzzles can be fun and rewarding. Try HackerRank or CodeSignal. But solving them on a whiteboard during a job interview can be… more stressful than fun. The book Cracking the Coding Interviewcomes with high praise and…

There is No Cloud…

Thanks to Twitter user Juan Pernia for the image.

I signed up for Amazon Web Services around a year ago. I remember playing around and being impressed. But I never did much more with it.

This semester I am once again teaching a Database Administration course at Christopher Newport University. One of my students shared with me that his summer job heavily utilized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud,…

New Hosting / New WordPress

I’d like to share my #UnpopularOpinion and say that GoDaddy is an excellent hosting provider with impressive tech support. I’ve always been quick to call and ask them questions, and they always explain everything without talking down to me. They know web developers.

I recently took advantage of a sale on GoDaddy’s Deluxe Hostingand secured three years worth of hosting for as many web sites as…

Diversity, not for political reasons, but for survival

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45425872

There are others who can write about this more eloquently than I can, but pulling your leaders from many walks of life across the spectrum of gender, race, nationality, and even age, is essential to your organization’s survival. Google knows it. So does Apple.

Physics labs contain, in my experience, a cult of old technology. They use…

ARM64 Assembly with Swift and XCode

Here is a popular interview question:

Given an unsigned integer, how would you count the number of set bits (that is, bits = 1)?

This is otherwise known as a Hamming Weight, and there are clever tricks for solving this problem using only a few lines of C. You could also use a loop with shift and compare:

int popcount(int x) { int i; int count = 0; for (i = 0; i < sizeof(int)*8; i++) { if ( (x&1)…

I recently ran across the need for a large integer in Swift – something that needs more than the 64 bits provided by Int64. This is not the first time. I have played around with Swift Decimal in the past (NSDecimal, NSDecimalNumber) only to find they come up short in precisely representing a rational number. Python, for example, makes it trivial to find the Nth decimal place of any rational…

So I’ve been silent here for the better part of a year, and I just wanted to say why: I made  a major career change and started a new job. I write Android apps for a tech company here in Williamsburg, VA now. The job is great, but I have been very busy. I intend to continue posting about iOS, Math, Python, AI, Databases, and now Android.

Cheers!

http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/112158952123/kingdom-come-and-related-debacles-epilogue

I cannot add or subtract anything from this.

Heapsort, because I haven’t posted in a while

This is heapsort in a Swift playground. I needed a stable sort, so naturally I wrote an… unstable sort.

Of course, you can just use sort() or sorted(), but if you are inclined to roll your own, the Swifty way to do it is to create an extension. Note that an Array extension with a Generic Where Clause is needed to make element comparisons > < == work.

//: Playground - noun: a place where people…

Matrix Operations in Swift

I recently completed 10 Days of Statistics on HackerRank. Yay!

In the process, I needed some matrix operations for a medium-difficulty problem. And here they are, code style be damned :

func transpose(_ matrix: [[Double]]) -> [[Double]] { let rowCount = matrix.count let colCount = matrix[0].count var transposed : [[Double]] = Array(repeating: Array(repeating: 0.0, count: rowCount), count:…

iOS Williamsburg – Swift Basics

Do you want to learn Swift syntax, have fun, and meet an enthusiastic group of developers? Come by the Williamsburg Library at 515 Scotland Street, Williamsburg, VA, on Saturday, August 12, 2017. We will be going over Swift basics. We have many experienced developers who are eager to share tips and help newcomers.

https://www.meetup.com/Williamsburg-ios-Development-Meetup/events/241956731/

I hope…