Hello visitor! I want to be the first to welcome you to my new site. You might see a few pages break over the next few days while I get everything sorted out.

During week 4 of my class in Operating Systems, I learned about thread synchronization. Since this whole class is based in Java, we’ve been implementing all of the OS ideas in Java. I’ve taken a Java class before where we dealt with threads but it was quite a while ago. We used things like Thread.new() and Thread.sleep(). I’ve now learned that both of those are quite outdated ways to deal with threads....

My own prediction is that TDD is the deciding factor. You don’t need static type checking if you have 100% unit test coverage. And, as we have repeatedly seen, unit test coverage close to 100% can, and is, being achieved. What’s more, the benefits of that achievement are enormous. Therefore, I predict, that as TDD becomes ever more accepted as a necessary professional discipline, dynamic languages will become the preferred languages....

Over the Christmas break, Ruby dropped a new version. I installed it as soon as I heard and I’ve been exploring it since. There are a few things in it that I think will be super useful so I thought I’d write a bit about them. Lonely Operator This is a neat operator that Ruby stole from other languages. It looks kind of strange: &.. It allows you to collapse a bunch of nil checks into a single statement....

I was listening to a new (for me) podcast [http://bikeshed.fm/45] about development. The people hosting it are famous rails [https://github.com/rails/rails] developers but they also talk about other topics. One of the developers has a side project where he is creating an ORM for this new language Rust [https://www.rust-lang.org/]. An ORM is a layer between the database and a language that abstracts away a lot of the details of the database. It usually makes it a lot easier to deal with a database....

It’s that time of year again: National Novel Writing Month. The month where everyone strives to write a 50,000 word novel. I follow a bunch of author’s blogs and they all write about this event every year Charles Stross [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/10/how-to-stay-in-the-zone-for-na.html] , John Scalzi [http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/11/01/a-quick-note-on-nanowrimo/] , and even Wesley Crusher [http://wilwheaton.net/2008/11/in-which-wil-at/]. Last year, I read all about it and decided to try it out. November arrived and my fingers did nothing. Out of my 50,000 word goal, I wrote exactly 0....

Over the past year or so, I have become much more interested in personal finance. Last summer, I started using a program called YouNeedABudget [http://www.youneedabudget.com] to track all of my spending. Doing that, I’ve managed to stop accumulating debt. I also have a debt spreadsheet that I use which allows me to snowball [http://www.daveramsey.com/blog/get-out-of-debt-with-the-debt-snowball-plan/] the payments to my various debts. As you can see, my minimum payments are around $500 and I’m adding $200 extra towards the debts....

For those who missed it, I decided to try following Benjamin Franklin’s schedule [http://blog.christopherjones.us/2015/09/01/ben-franklin-schedule/]. I think I picked a poor week to try this schedule change. Monday and Tuesday were successful. I felt super productive. I woke up at 5am both days. I had time to workout, check email, and eat breakfast before I started getting ready for work. Then came Wednesday. I had to be at an exercise at 7am on the dot so I didn’t have much time to get relax before getting ready....

I’m always looking for how to be more productive. This week, I was reading through my news feeds on feedly [https://feedly.com/] and came across an article from J. Money on Budgets Are Sexy about living Benjamin Franklin’s schedule [http://www.budgetsaresexy.com/2015/07/working-benjamin-franklin-schedule/]. My ears perked up. It’s a pretty straight-forward schedule. I decided give it a test run this week. Here’s what it looks like from Ben Franklin himself . I don’t know how he managed on so little sleep each night....

I started reading a lot this year about gardening. I grew up with everyone I know gardening. Both of my grandfathers gardened and so did my dad. Everyone was doing it. I feel like maybe I should do it too. I started out reading a great book on the topic called The Backyard Homestead [smile.amazon.com/The-Backyard-Homestead-Produce-quarter/dp/1603421386]. I initially found this book at a book warehouse and talked myself out of it because at the time we were living in an apartment and didn’t really have the room to garden....