Tim Hoolihan

A couple of months ago, I finished reading Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup. It got me to thinking about startups and small projects I’ve been a part of in the past. Every time you sit down to put more into the project, you’re saying that you will get that back in cash on the other [...]

I was asked by a fellow developer how I keep up to date on the variety of technologies that I’m expected to understand when doing my job. I intended to write a short answer, and generate a blog post as a longer answer. I got this idea from Scott Hanselman, who in his talks about [...]

One of the projects that I work on uses NuGet for library management. We have a rake task that runs build, clean, etc. One of the rake tasks runs NuGet.exe which is stored in a tools directory. That way, everyone uses the same version of NuGet even if they have different versions installed in their [...]

This post is intended to go through the process of writing and publishing an app. It will be a high-level introduction. The idea is that future posts that will dig into specific topics in depth. This post will be updated to link to those future posts as an index of mobile development topics. The app [...]

I’ve been playing with development in several of the mobile platforms over the last year, and for iOS in particular. Many developers are intimidated because of the differences between objective-c and other languages and the differences between cocoa touch and other frameworks. How to get started is one of the most common questions around. First [...]

When altering a table to an Oracle reduce a columns size, you’ll get a ORA-01440 error, indicating that you can’t make the adjustment because of the potential data loss. I had to do this to recently to a bunch of columns, as I had incorrectly specified the size of numbers that would end up as [...]

Tell me these aren’t relevant. Tell me it isn’t like a summation of Wall Streets mistakes leading up to 2008. Deming died in 1993. Deming’s 7 Deadly Diseases of Management* Lack of constancy of purpose Emphasis on short term profits Evaluation of performance, merit rating or annual review Mobility of top management Running a company [...]

…or some other catchy metaphor that will grab your attention. These technologies were hot over the last 5 years. Flex gained a particular amount of popularity in the Java community where UI technologies have a bit of a spotty record (that’s like saying my Bengals have a bit of a spotty record over a lifetime). [...]

I read The Myth of Multitasking this fall, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I let the book sit a bit after reading before writing this post, in order to see what type of difference it has made. Having read it, and worked through the exercises in the book, and put the principles into [...]

Let me say up front, Steve Yegge is my favorite blog writer. I think I started reading his blog in late 2007, and really picked up digging through the archives in 2008. He is the reason I still write blog posts. This blog does decent traffic for a hobbyist technical blog, but it’s still like [...]