Articles by David Bolton

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  5 Reasons to Use a VM for Development

  I started using virtual machines (VMs) on my development PC about six years ago; I was keen to learn Linux, having been a Windows developer since the mid-1990s. At first, I used an old Windows PC and installed…
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  Writing Faster Python with Functions, Lists, and More

  Python is a great language that’s easy to learn (just keep in mind: "always indent after colons"), but it’s also possible that your written code ends up being quite slow. Such inelegantly written code isn’t “Py…
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  Joys of Raspberry Pi Development: A Walkthrough

  My first computer, an Amstrad PC1512 that I bought new in 1989, cost $1,200 (or roughly $2,460 in 2019 dollars). It came with 512Kb of RAM and two floppy disks, and ran at 8 MHZ. Thirty years later, I bought a…
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  Eclipse IDE: Getting Started, Plugins, and More

  With the recent quarterly release of the Eclipse IDE, it’s a good time to see how both the IDE and the larger Foundation are progressing. I started using Eclipse about 14 years ago, not long after a consortium…
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  PHP: A Quick Introduction to a Complex Language

  PHP is a quarter-century old… and for the first 20 years, it had no written specification. That’s astounding, and probably explains why it was a bit of a challenge for many developers to get their heads around…
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  Speeding Up a SQL Application: a Walkthrough

  Not so long ago, I had to figure out why an old desktop application, written mainly in Delphi and using a proprietary file-based database, felt a bit slow when moved to SQL (with a bit of C# added on the front-…
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  Five 'Gotchas!' in a Nightmare Delphi, C++ Project

  This is a tale of the "fun" I've had creating some software. It involves taking a Microsoft technology called Virtual Channel and using it with an older programming language, Delphi. I want to show what can hap…
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  Python Debugging: How to Improve Your Skills

  When you work with visual programming languages such as Delphi, C#, and VB.NET, you're a bit spoiled for debugging options as they’re nicely integrated into their IDEs. But when it comes to Python, debugging “o…
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  Asynchronous Programming in Python: A Walkthrough

  When we talk about program execution, “asynchronous” means that the program doesn't wait for a particular process to complete, but carries on regardless. An example of asynchronous programming is a program writ…
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  Programming for .NET Core: A Beginner's Walkthrough

  Since its first appearance in 2002, the .NET framework has been a major success for Windows. Along the way, it spawned the .NET Compact Framework on Windows CE, as well as the .NET Micro Framework (targeted at…