Technology – Page 5 – Chad Dotson

Machine Learning and the Curiosity Engine

By chad October 10, 2014Key Concepts, TechnologyNo Comments

The Future As we progress technologically, there is an increased focus on machine learning. That is a machine that is not necessarily programmed with the algorithm to solve a problem, but one that has been programmed with the ability to take a given set of input, classify it, and generate…

Becoming an Entrepreneur as a Software Engineer Vol 1

By chad October 5, 2014Programming, Software Engineering, WorkNo Comments

This is the first post in what I plan to be a series. In these posts, I will explore ideas in entrepreneurship. It's a given that working for yourself, while it brings many risks, can bring many rewards. I believe that it is one of the only ways to achieve…

My Swift App – An Ongoing Experiment

By chad October 2, 2014Programming, Software Engineering2 Comments

Work is progressing on my first iOS app written in Swift. I think that I might have a rudimentary alpha product ready to start testing in a few weeks. Based on my experience with it so far, here are some of my thoughts, observations, and concerns. Developing in Swift is…

Swift – A Quick First Impression

By chad September 22, 2014ProgrammingNo Comments

Swift and Xcode 6 Late last week Apple released Xcode 6 to the general public. I've been waiting for the opportunity to try out Swift, so I started working on an idea I've had. General Thoughts This is probably a general iOS development comment, but the way you link items…

DSLR Lightning Trigger

By chad September 7, 2014Arduino, Hobbies, Photography, Programming, Raspberry Pi, Software Engineering, Technology8 Comments

Lightning I use my Nikon D5000 to take a lot of lightning photos. This one to the right is a composite of several taken during a storm that produced a good amount of of photogenic lightning a few years back. The photos that make up this one and many of…

Comparing Node.js and Python on the Raspberry PI

By chad August 25, 2014Key Concepts, Programming, Raspberry Pi, Software Engineering8 Comments

Programming on the Raspberry Pi Python seems to be the more popular language for writing programs on the Raspberry Pi. However, it is far from the only language: Python, C, C++, Java, and Ruby are some that are automatically supported out of the box. As it turns out Node.js is…

Everyone's A Coder

By chad August 24, 2014Software EngineeringNo Comments

Question: Are we headed to an era where everyone should know how to write at least some rudimentary code? Learn to Code Today, there are many sites on the internet offering to "teach you to code." Two of which are KhanAcademy and CodeAcademy. These sites offer a selection of…

Project Excelsior – Technology Update

By chad August 18, 2014Diversions, Programming, Software Engineering, TechnologyNo Comments

For the past month or so I've been working on a little side project that I've dubbed "Project Excelsior." I've not had an abundance of time to spend on it over the past few week, so I'm just now wringing out some of the technology stack. I've almost decided completely…

No Comments – A Failure Twice

By chad August 17, 2014Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Everyone that writes code has encountered or written their fair share of undocumented code. A failure twice? I was encouraged to write this article because of something I read about the pinball game that once was included with windows. According to the article on MSDN, the pinball game was removed…

Node.js vs Python vs PyPy – A Simple Performance Comparison

By chad August 2, 2014Programming, Software Engineering, Technology28 Comments

IMPORTANT NOTE: The NodeJS algorithm had a slight discrepancy in it. See this article for a correction to the performance comparison section of this article. The Algorithm Yesterday, I decided to try translate my algorithm for calculating N-Queens to JavaScript. I've implemented the same single-thread, brute force, recursive algorithm in…