25 Jun 2010

Learning When It's Time to Walk Away from a Project

I wanted to take the time to follow up on some of the additional lessons I learned from my May startup project, some of which I already shared in The Myth of the Single-Person Startup.

This week I decided to indefinitely postpone my startup project, the same project I spent a...

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22 Jun 2010

Programmer's Dilemma: Baby-Proofing vs. Giving Guns to Monkeys

One of my best friends from college once described a previous job in the financial industry as something akin to "giving guns to monkeys."

He felt that the product he sold, although it was something that could reap tremendous benefits for his customers if used properly, was something that more often than not harmed...

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14 Jun 2010

How to Query a User's del.icio.us Feed with RestSharp

I've been meaning to give RestSharp a go since I first started using Hammock in my startup project's codebase, just because I had heard some good things about RestSharp's auto-parsing capabilities.

This weekend I cobbled together a small example using del.icio.us' RSS feeds (not to be confused with its draconian REST API) for users and RestSharp performed magnificently, although its POCO -> XML Element mapping process requires a lot of experimentation before you get it just right.

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13 Jun 2010

The Myth of the Single-Person Startup

During the month of May, 2010 I took an unpaid leave of absence from work for the entire month and set off to launch my own web-based startup company.

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09 Jun 2010

Discussion: How to Use RestSharp / Hammock to Automatically Parse the YouTube Response Format into POCO Objects

If you've been following me on Twitter over the past couple of weeks, you might have noticed that I've been a little frustrated with the YouTube GData API lately. Simply put: XML makes me sad. Since that frustrated Tweet I've developed a solution using LINQ-to-XML and a bunch...

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07 Jun 2010

Two Ways to Randomize IList Objects

I recently developed a self-sorted IList implementation for a project and I needed some automated way to unit test it - so naturally, the best way to automatically test a sorting function is to force it to sort the results of an unsorting function ;). Just for reference, IList is...

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02 Jun 2010

Frustration Central: Parsing the DateTime Values from the SlideShare REST API

I feel a little bad about posting this given that Jon Boutelle, the CTO of SlideShare, already admitted that this portion of the SlideShare 2.0 REST API sucks and that they're going to fix it eventually, but given that I'm in the middle of rewriting my original SlideShare...

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28 May 2010

The State of Open Web APIs

I wanted to repost a presentation that I saw on Twitter yesterday which highlights some interesting trends in the state of open web APIs across the board:

27 May 2010

Making Basic Requests Against the SlideShare API Using HammockREST

The project I'm currently working on involves numerous REST APIs from a multitude of very different services. In my initial prototype, which I've since scrapped, I went with trying to use a local wrapper for each REST API incorporated into my project, meaning I used the GData library for...

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24 May 2010

How to Use the Microsoft Enterprise Library Validation Application Block, Part 1

All user input is evil, and you know it. Since the inception of .NET, ASP.NET developers have had access to the ASP.NET Validators Control Library, which made the previously tedious process of validating form input simple and in many instances, trivial. Microsoft's Enterprise Library makes this familiar ASP.NET functionality...

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