Programming

On the Quality of Training Materials - Blog Posts 2020-04-19

This is the final part in a series of posts in which I air my gripes and grievances (and complements!) about various kinds of software development training and reference materials.

One of the most common ways of learning about software development is through reading the blog posts of other developers and assorted schmoes. At a high level, this option appears to be the lowest risk as well as the lowest reward. Blog posts are (usually) free, are easy to search for, and are (again, usually) short. If you find one that looks promising, read through it, and discover it is junk, you will have wasted very little time. On the flip side, if you find one that is helpful, it is likely helpful in solving a very specific problem or answering a very specific question.

On the Quality of Training Materials - Official Docs 2020-04-18

This is part 2 in a series of posts in which I air my gripes and grievances (and complements!) about various kinds of software development training and reference materials.

This post is all about the official documentation and reference materials for languages, frameworks, tools, etc.

To be honest, I don’t have much negative to say here. Most of the official documentation I encounter is high quality stuff that I find myself relying on more and more.

My purpose in this post is not to complain, but to make an observation. The purpose of reference docs is to inform, which is not the same as to teach. It exists to inform you of all the things the language/framework/tool can do, but in most cases it has no interest in showing you how to use it in an application. I hesitate to call this a problem because teaching is not the point of reference docs.

Now, if you are a seasoned developer, this will not be a problem. You should be able to read through a page of reference docs and understand how to apply the material to your own projects.

But what if you are not a seasoned dev? In that case, you might have a very hard time teaching yourself from reference documentation. Without enough practical practice, you may not know why a feature is useful, or how a bit of syntax might help you. This highlights how important it is for there to be other kinds of training material beyond reference docs that focuses on how to apply this knowledge.

It also highlights how important it is for this kind of material to be written by experienced people who are not only knowledgeable, but are able to convey taht knowledge to non experts.

On the Quality of Training Materials - Online Courses 2020-04-18

This is part 1 in a series of posts in which I air my gripes and grievances (and complements!) about various kinds of software development training and reference materials. This is all a followup to this recent post.

Online courses are all the rage in software development, and to be fair, they can be very useful in some cases. Depending on what you are looking for, and the quality of the course, you may be able to learn a ton from just a single course.

However, online classes have a lot of potential pitfalls as well. In the worst case scenario, not only will they not help you, but they can waste a lot of your time.

On the Quality of Training Materials in Software Development 2020-04-18

Hey, a post related to software development! I haven’t had one of those in quite some time.

One thing I am learning during this pandemic-induced quarantine is that, as stressful and tiring as my job can be, I need it (or something like it) in my life. After a few days of sitting at home, spending most of my time watching my kids, I felt a figurative pressure inside of me, a pressure not simply to be productive, but to work on code. I need the regular schedule mental stimulation that I get from working on and with software.

For years I have wondered why I struggle to work on any programming side projects in my free time. Now I know the answer - it is not a lack of willpower, but a lack of mental energy. When I go to work every day, I come home mentally drained. Take me out of work for a long period of time, however, and all I want to do is side projects and training.

Nevertheless, it has not been easy. As I said, I have kids to watch, and that is not conducive to getting on a laptop. Beyond that, however, there is a bigger problem.

Thoughts on Python 2017-08-15

I’ve been learning some Python this past month. My initial thoughts are as follows:

The language itself is fine I guess. Close enough to Ruby to make me happy. I still don’t like the significant whitespace, but I found a formatting tool that aligns my code according to the official style guide, so I only ever have to add the bare minimum indentation, and let the tool take care of the rest. It’s the closest I can get to avoiding it.

Java EE Tutorials - JPA 2016-01-25

After 15 posts, it is time for this tutorial series to move on from Servlets (and related technologies) in order to cover another part of the Java EE stack - the Java Persistence API, or JPA.

Before we discuss the what and the why of JPA, let’s talk a little about JDBC.

JDBC

If you write Java code for long enough, you’ll find yourself using JDBC sooner or later. And for good reason; it is easy to configure without having to pull down tons of dependencies, and low level enough that you can make it do whatever you want.

That being said, when you find yourself working on a large, database-intensive application, JDBC starts to show its limits. For instance, it would require you to write and manage a ton of hand written SQL statements, and since each database has a slightly different SQL syntax, these statements won’t be portable if you ever switch DB’s.

Additionally, if your database rows are large and complex, you will have to pick through the ResultSet objects returned by JDBC to extract for each column one by one. In short, JDBC is nice to have around, but for certain situations it is more trouble than it is worth.

Java EE Tutorials - JSP and the JSTL 2015-10-04

In our last post, we talked about how to write custom JSP tags and add them to a taglib. Today we will go over the most famous taglib of all. The JSTL, or Java Standard Tag Library, is exactly what its name says it is. And like the rest of the Java EE family, it is defined by a specification, and implemented by a servlet container. The library tries to define tags which perform the most common tasks you might use on a JSP page, so that you don’t have to write them yourself.

The example code for this post can be found in the jsp_jstl branch of our example repository on Github, and a ZIP file of the code can be found here.

Java EE Tutorials - JSP Custom Taglibs 2015-09-07

Our tour of Java Server Pages wraps up with a discussion of custom taglibs. The example code for this post can be found in the jsp_taglib branch of our example repository on Github, and a ZIP file of the code can be found here.

So far, we’ve only looked at how to directly inline Java code into our JSP pages. This approach does its job, but it doesn’t have a lot of fans among Java developers, for reasons we’ve discussed before (code gets messy, business logic gets stuffed into the presentation layer, etc). This is where custom taglibs come into play as an alternative.

Java EE Tutorials - JSP and MVC 2015-08-17

Today we will be looking at how Java Server Pages are used in Model-View-Controller setups. The example code can be found in the jsp_part_3 branch of our example repository on Github, and a ZIP file of the code can be found here.

I mentioned in our introduction to JSP that JSP is often used as the View component in many Java-based MVC frameworks. Unfortunately, if you aren’t familiar with MVC, this isn’t the best time and place to explain it in detail. Suffice to say that in order for JSP to be feasible as the View component, it needs be able to accept real data so that it can render it on the page. So far, none of our previous examples have demonstrated this capability, but rest assured that it does exist.