Today at work the issue of refactoring some code came up. I was given the green light to refactor it so long as I thought I could do it relatively quickly, in a half day or so. This code isn’t the worst code in the application, but it certainly isn’t winning any beauty contests any [...]

REPL: noun Read-Eval-Print-Loop: an interactive top level or shell; a simple, interactive computer programming environment. That definition was shamelessly adapted from the wikpedia article. Floating around the web lately, there has been a lot of debate about whether Java should or should not be the first programming language taught to someone. It was started by [...]

If, like me, you’ve been seeing various blogs speak on MapReduce, you might, like me, wonder exactly what MapReduce is? You can always turn to the wikipedia entry. But sometimes, you’d like to dig a little deeper. A good whitepaper might hit the spot. So here it is: MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. [...]