Technology – Page 6 – Chad Dotson

Knowing When You've Wrote Crappy Code

By chad July 26, 2014Doing Things Better, Key Concepts, Programming, Software Engineering5 Comments

Note: This article was kicked off by one I read over at LosTechies. We write lots of code, statistically speaking some of it is what we'd deem as "crappy." If you're doing things right and progressing in your career and your understanding; your definition of "crappy code" should change over…

Apple's Magic Mouse – A Software Engineer's Perspective

By chad July 19, 2014Ramblings, TechnologyNo Comments

Over the past month I've been trying to make the transition from my old windows environment to an OSX environment. Part of the transition involved buying a Magic Mouse. Apple's Magic Mouse is definitely a very interesting device. It is a very accurate mouse with the added capability of a…

Isolate, Understand, Implement

By chad July 18, 2014Doing Things Better, Key Concepts, Programming, Software EngineeringNo Comments

Isolate, understand, implement: three very important things to remember when adding, modifying or replacing features on a project. The first step is to isolate the feature. Hopefully, your project is designed in such a way that once the code is isolated it is in a single place. The next step…

Generating JSON Documents From SQLite Databases In Python

By chad June 22, 2014Programming, Tips3 Comments

Special Note This article assumes that you do not wish to use a more sophisticated ORM tool such as SQLAlchemy. Some Setup Let's start with a Q&D sqlite database given the following sql. create table sample(column1 INTEGER, column2 TEXT, column3 TEXT, column4 REAL); insert into sample(column2, column2, column3, column4) values(1,…

First Impressions of Rust

By chad April 7, 2014Programming1 Comment

Today I finished my first program written in Rust 0.10. As with my article on Dart earlier this weekend I'm going to rely on Wikipedia for short intro for what Rust is. The goal of Rust is to be a good language for the creation of large client and server…

First Impressions of Dart

By chad April 5, 2014Programming1 Comment

Today I finished my first Dart tutorial. For those that don't know what Dart is, Wikipedia has a nice synopsis that I've included here. Dart is an open-source Webprogramming language developed by Google. It was unveiled at the GOTO conference in Aarhus, October 10–12, 2011.[4] The goal of Dart is…

My First Raspberry Pi Project

By chad December 28, 2013Featured, Hobbies, Neat Stuff, Raspberry PiNo Comments

Almost every year, I try to select a fun project to do while off for Christmas. This year the project I selected was based on Raspberry Pi. Specifically I decided to build a device that would, when motion is detected, find the range to the motion using an ultrasonic rangefinder,…

The Early Days of Flight

By chad December 7, 2013Ramblings, Technology, UncategorizedNo Comments

This post started from a comment I made on facebook about the "Volocopter" story on CNN. At the time my comment was "Why does this look like something from the early days of flight?" That it turns out is a very good question and an even better follow-up, "Aren't we in…

The Final Apollo Mission – December 7, 1972

By chad December 7, 2013Ramblings, Technology, UncategorizedNo Comments

On December 7, 1972 (41 years ago today) the final manned mission to the moon blasted off from Kennedy Space Center. Eugene Cernan was the last person to walk on the moon on December 14, 1972 at roughly 05:40 GMT. It is ultimately hard to believe that its been 41…