Dennis's Corner of the Internet

In my previous post, I wrote about shipping a small little project I had been working on, called Trello Echo. I mostly built it for myself and I haven't done a ton of self-promotion on it, but it's had a few people log in

When working in software development, there are very few things that create an exhilirating sense of happiness and excitement than when you ship software. Whether it's because you're curious to see how the people will react to it, or simply just sheer relief that

One of my favorite online comics, CommitStrip, published this brilliant comic that made me laugh and almost cry simultaneously since I've been caught in this trap many, many times before: I'm pretty sure that just about every single developer who has worked any amount

In my previous blog post, I wrote about my experiences on oDesk, and what worked for me to be able to get a relatively steady stream of clients. As I mentioned, oDesk seems to have a less-than-stellar reputation, particularly among software developers. But as

In the past few months since I began doing freelance work full-time, I've had a few conversations with some of my former technical co-workers. They're naturally curious to hear how I've been doing with freelancing since I've left the relative stability of full-time employment.

In case you missed it, I've spent the last week writing about the goals I want to accomplish. I've expressed my desire to write more blog posts (which I'm doing!), get better at freelancing, expand my programming knowledge and continuing to lose weight at

I've enjoyed being able to sit down be able to flesh out the plans for what I want to accomplish in 2015. I've already indicated most of my goals: write more posts on this website, growing my freelancing business and learn some more programming,

Note: I decided to write down my goals for 2015. My previous blog post "My Goals for 2015 - Part 1" explains my reasoning why. In short, I want to feel accountable in a public manner, as well as be able to

Note: I decided to write down my goals for 2015, so here's part 2 of that list. My previous blog post "My Goals for 2015 - Part 1" explains my reasoning why. In short, I want to feel accountable in a public

This is the time of year where most people sit down and reflect on where they are, where they've been and hopefully where they're planning to go in the upcoming year. To be honest, I'm typically not that type of person. To me, the

Last month, I wrote a blog post about my thoughts on purchasing a new laptop for myself. I thought this was going to take me a few weeks to ponder over whether I should keep going with the familiarity of Apple and buy a

Last week, I received a notification from someone who was looking for a developer to continue development on an existing web application. This was your run-of-the-mill contract job posting, until I got to the following sentence: "This platform has been upgraded recently with

As a software engineer, one of the tools of the trade that you invest in is having a kick-ass computer system. One that has enough processor speed to put an early 2000's supercomputer to shame, enough RAM to let you run enough virtual machines

Being a newly converted Android user late last year (and still very happy with my Nexus 5), I was very interested in the Google I/O event that happened a few weeks ago. Of course, I wanted to see what Google has in store

Today, I read a blog post titled I Hate Open Floorplans, It Makes Roger Come Out... from a fellow software engineer, and his story about working in an office that has an open floor plan. Seeing that I had a disappointing experience this week

I've been running this website for seven years now, and when I set it up, I decided to use WordPress for its initial setup. I had used WordPress for some internal work projects so I was already familiar with the software, making it easier

Ah, Internet Explorer. It's the bane of most web developers, especially in those times when you forget to test it before deploying your site to production. I'm sure if there's one thing that causes more grey hairs to grow on our heads, it's because

I've been studying Japanese for quite some time now. The Japanese language, as you might expect, is pretty deep. Besides all the gairaigo (borrowed words from English and other languages), just about everything is different, from the grammar to the writing. As such, there

The current laptop I use for work is a Macbook Pro I bought back in 2009. To be honest, I bought this laptop because I was insanely jealous of TextMate. Also, this was a period when it seemed all the cool Rubyists were developing

I've been living in the Bay Area for two years now. One of the main reasons why I wanted to move over here is the large population of tech people that exist in this area. From Computer Science students in U.C. Berkeley, to

For the past ten years or so, even before I graduated from college, a large chunk of my spare time has been dedicated to studying. More specifically, it's been dedicated to studying technology. Everything from programming languages I've wanted to use to new frameworks

Now that I live on the West Coast, I've been able to attend many of the wonderful tech conferences that are hosted in the Bay Area. Yesterday, I attended MongoSF in beautiful San Francisco. I've been using MongoDB for a while now, mostly for

Lately, I've been on a hardcore iOS development learning phase. To be honest, I've been wanting to learn iOS development for a while (probably since I got my first iPhone two years ago). But I either never had the time to sit down and

Failing tests are the worst, especially when caused by a silly cut / paste mistake (an instance variable had to be changed to be a local variable, but guess who forgot to remove the '@' sign...). While my tests run again to make sure

Update - Unfortunately, Notifo closed up and ceased operations in January 2013, so this tool is no longer functional. Last week, I was doing some routine maintenance on my VPS (which I should definitely do more often, as well as writing some more blog