Articles by David Bolton
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How Long Does It Take to Learn a New Skill?
When employers say they need specific skills, job seekers often reply that an experienced IT professional can learn a new language or technology quickly. But is that really the case? It may be if… -
A NoSQL Alternative: Disk Folders
One of the joys of programming is that there are often many different ways to accomplish the same goal. That comes in handy when you’re not feeling too confident about a given solution. Consider… -
Coding Challenge Wrap-Up: Who Won at Sevens
This was the contest I thought would never get started. Although the game Sevens is easy to play, getting the bot-runner code to run the compiled bots proved to be harder that I thought. I solved… -
An Employee’s Guide to Open Source Contributions
Creating your own project or otherwise contributing to open source is the kind of thing that can help you show off your skills to potential employers. Beyond that, many programmers contribute bec… -
How to Write a Game Runner Program
I wrote the runsevens game runner program to automate the running of the Tournament of Sevens programming challenge, and it was an interesting little project. It’s designed to do the following: M… -
5 Techniques to Increase Your Programming Productivity
Every programmer has his or her techniques for being more productive and writing more code. Having been on a three month contract where I wrote and debugged 5,000 lines of code in two weeks, I th… -
How One Line of Code Forced a Full OS Release
It's not often that Apple 'fesses up about a bug, but the release iOS 7.0.6 came about because somehow an extra line of code got added to a function and broke it. Normally a bug would probably no… -
A Look at Microsoft’s PCL for SQLite
Having grown up in a world where the concept was anathema to Microsoft, it seems strange to think of them now on the side of open source. In 2002, for instance, there was public debate about the… -
The 5 Best Ways to Contribute to Open Source Projects
So you've got a bit of programming experience and some spare time available, and the thought of gaining experience, reputation and maybe even a paid job (hey, it worked for Linus Torvalds!) has t… -
2 Free C Compilers Worth a Look
It's surprising how important the C programming language remains, as it's now over 40 years since it was first created. It’s a simple but useful language that gives you a very low level view of m…