Where have all the good databases gone?

Perhaps you’ll recognize these words, “About five years ago I started to notice an odd thing. The products that the database vendors were building had less and less to do with what the customers wanted. … So, what is this growing disconnect?” Those words were written in 2...

Easy bash scripting with shflags

One of the most frustrating things about bash scripts is how challenging it is to create unix style executables. You know, the ones where you can pass in -h or –help and see the set of options for the program. Up until now this has been a very manual process in bash, but no lon...

Competition for the Cloud Heats Up

Cloud no longer a single vendor game. For years cloud computing has been synonymous with Amazon whose Amazon Web Services really created and defined the space. In the past year other providers have matured and in some areas even surpassing Amazon. In a conversation with Scott Whi...

Control structures - Go defer statement

Other topics in this series - Table of ContentsThe defer statement allows you to designate specified functions to be executed just before returning from the current function block. Why would this be useful? In programming we often have to allocate/block/lock resources, but then...

Control structures - Go switch case statement

Other topics in this series - Table of ContentsThe switch statement may be considered a more powerful version of the if statement where multiple if-else blocks are replaced with a single switch and multiple case blocks. There are differences though between the two and we shall s...

Control structures - Go for loop, break, continue, range

Other topics in this series - Table of ContentsThe for statement is the only available looping statement in Go. The generic statement definition is: for "initialization statements"; "bool expression that has to evaluate to true"; "statements run prior to every loop except the...

Control structures - Go if else statement

Other topics in this series - Table of ContentsPrograms need to be able to take up different courses of action based on different situations - if you want to go to the beach turn left, or if you want to go the movies, turn right. The if else statement is a simple control structu...

Creating a Symfony2 Console Command

One of the weaknesses of PHP as a languages has always been it’s ability to write proper command line utilities. Yes PHP is pretty much built to drive the web, and it does that rather well, but there are plenty of reasons to want to be able to write a program that is callable f...

Pandora's IPO ... a sign of the times

Pandora filed their IPO today. By end of day Pandora was worth 3.2 Billion . The amazing thing about stock is it really has no direct correlation to a companies actual performance, but is rather valued based on perception, hype and desire. All very human emotions, not logic. Appa...

Multiple return values from Go functions

Other topics in this series - Table of ContentsGo allows you to have a function that returns multiple values. A function definition that returns three values would be defined similar to: func SumProdDiff(i, j int) (int, int, int) Since there is more than one return value, it i...