tech – Chad Dotson

You're Too Close

By chad December 9, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, TipsNo Comments

Have you encountered the following scenario? You are trying to solve a problem (or helping solve a problem) and know or at least think you know the solution. You are in the middle of implementing it when someone else looks at it and says, "why don't you do it this…

Node.js vs Python vs PyPy – A Simple Performance Comparison – Updated

By chad December 30, 2014Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, Uncategorized5 Comments

Some History This is a followup to my original post: Node.js vs Python vs PyPy - A Simple Performance Comparison. This article corrects a discrepancy caused by a slight difference in the JavaScript implementation which skewed the Node.js results. The Algorithm As stated in the previous article, I've attempted to…

Comparing Node.js and Python on the Raspberry PI

By chad August 25, 2014Key Concepts, Programming, Raspberry Pi, Software Engineering8 Comments

Programming on the Raspberry Pi Python seems to be the more popular language for writing programs on the Raspberry Pi. However, it is far from the only language: Python, C, C++, Java, and Ruby are some that are automatically supported out of the box. As it turns out Node.js is…

Project Excelsior – Technology Update

By chad August 18, 2014Diversions, Programming, Software Engineering, TechnologyNo Comments

For the past month or so I've been working on a little side project that I've dubbed "Project Excelsior." I've not had an abundance of time to spend on it over the past few week, so I'm just now wringing out some of the technology stack. I've almost decided completely…

No Comments – A Failure Twice

By chad August 17, 2014Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Everyone that writes code has encountered or written their fair share of undocumented code. A failure twice? I was encouraged to write this article because of something I read about the pinball game that once was included with windows. According to the article on MSDN, the pinball game was removed…

Node.js vs Python vs PyPy – A Simple Performance Comparison

By chad August 2, 2014Programming, Software Engineering, Technology28 Comments

IMPORTANT NOTE: The NodeJS algorithm had a slight discrepancy in it. See this article for a correction to the performance comparison section of this article. The Algorithm Yesterday, I decided to try translate my algorithm for calculating N-Queens to JavaScript. I've implemented the same single-thread, brute force, recursive algorithm in…

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…

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…

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…