What are Objects, and why are they useful? A simple walk through Object-Oriented Programming’s rites of passage The Rise of Objects, a (Brief) History Programming at the advent of computing was purely imperative. There were no IDEs, no GUIs, nothing. In these nascent days of programming, tasks were easier to conceptualize. Programs consisted of a series of…

How utilizing your sense of smell can improve your coding ability — We’ve all read code that smells bad. There are few things worse in life than being on-boarded to a new project, firing up your favorite editor, and getting smacked in the face by a putrid stench. Wading your way through unfamiliar code may snap you back to a time when…

There’s a language that sits a layer beneath code, and it yearns to be explored At the time of writing, “which programming language should I learn” yields 517 million search results. …

A simple guide to getting up and running with Git on the command-line — Endlessly renaming your files may be a solid process for a 4th grader learning Microsoft Word, but you’re an engineer! We have the technology for greater version control but to the newly “git-nitiated” it can be intimidating. Often people ignore, or delay, accepting it. In this post we’ll accomplish the…

What is Spark? Let’s take a look under the hood — In my last post we introduced a problem: copious, never ending streams of data, and its solution: Apache Spark. Here in part two, we’ll focus on Spark’s internal architecture and data structures. In pioneer days they used oxen for heavy pulling, and when one ox couldn’t budge a log, they…

With immense amounts of new data, we need a tool to rapidly digest it—and Spark is the answer — Data is all around us. The IDC estimated the size of the “digital universe” at 4.4 Zettabytes (1 Trillion Gigabytes) in 2013. Currently, the digital universe grows by 40% every year, and by 2020 the IDC expects it to be as large as 44 Zettabytes, amounting to a single bit…

One of the greatest decisions I made as an engineer was kicking my IDE to the curb and diving into a deep love-affair with the command-line. Terminals can be scary to the uninitiated: The colors are weird, text often flies across the screen faster than the eye can see, and…