Articles by David Bolton

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  5 Ways to Catch and Handle Errors in Desktop and Web Apps

  It’s a sad fact of life that, no matter how skilled the programmers writing it, all code has errors (at least initially). There are lots of reasons for this: misunderstanding the project specs, f…
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  Programmers, Get Familiar with 'Pythonic' Python

  Now in its 26th year (and still going strong in terms of popularity), Python stands out for its distinctive syntax compared to those programming languages based on C. Programmers appreciate how P…
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  4 Problems with Processor Thread Programming

  Threads are a useful way to get more out of your CPU. Technically known as a “thread of execution,” a thread is the smallest possible sequence of programmed instructions handled by a scheduler. M…
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  Managing SQL Server in Code: A Brief Walkthrough

  Microsoft's flagship relational database, SQL Server, is now 28 years old and still going strong. It comes with a decent set of management tools, ranging from SQL Management Studio to SQLCMD, a c…
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  A Quick Guide to Denormalizing Databases

  A relational database stores data in multiple tables. Each table has columns describing the type of information, and each row is an instance of that data. Codd's 12 Rules apply to relational data…
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  5 XML Alternatives to Consider

  It’s been two decades since Extensible Markup Language (XML), a markup language for encoding documents, made its debut. While XML has enjoyed considerable success during that time, many programme…
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  Add Two-Factor Authentication to Your Apps

  Recent years have seen repeated website hacks, with hackers capturing many user details. Even a tech-savvy firm like Uber isn’t immune: the ride-sharing giant faces scrutiny for a 2016 hack that…
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  5 Reasons Java Users Should Consider Kotlin

  Although it’s been six years since Kotlin first appeared, the programming language recently gained momentum when Google announced it would receive first-class support on Android. The latest itera…
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  Is Flat Design Actually Awful?

  Since 2007, the rise of mobile operating systems (and mobile apps) has changed how tech companies approach design. For the preceding twenty years (or so), the desktop had dominated as the “defaul…
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  Exploring the Dart Programming Language

  It’s been almost six years since Dart, a general-purpose programming language developed within Google, made its debut. Since then, it’s slowly risen in the rankings: the August edition of the TIO…