I’ve got a midterm tomorrow so instead of studying I’ve decided to post on my neglected blog. So without further ado: I try to avoid taking a strong stance on programming languages because depending on one’s need there are plenty of acceptable languages for any project. Java or C#? Whatever. Python or Ruby? Meh. Scala, [...]

Recently I’ve had the pleasure of developing a web app using a combination of jQuery and YUI on the front end.  These two frameworks take strikingly different approaches to JavaScript development.  YUI is massive, verbose, and feels like using a mildly over-engineered Java library.  JQuery code tends to be much smaller and functional.  I imagine [...]

Up until recently I was a bit fuzzy on the difference between concurrency and distributed systems.  It was not until I was studying Facebook Chat, Erlang, Scala, Go, and the new python web server Tornado that it finally clicked.  Concurrency simply implies that two or more pieces of code are executing at the same time.  Distributed system are [...]

My next coop position will be with Amazon.com in Seattle from January to April 2010.  I’m excited and a bit nervous to be working at Amazon!  Getting this kind of coop position is one of the major reasons I chose Waterloo and the Software Engineering profession.  Hopefully the job lives up to the hype and I live [...]

I am sitting in ECE 126, Electricity and Magnetism.  I’m not paying attention (clearly because I’m writing this). This class is useless for a Software Engineer. Ordinarily, I am entranced and fascinated by advanced science, but calculating the voltage or capacitance of a complex circuit system is of little interest to me. Perhaps if we [...]

So maybe I don’t write a ton of blog updates… but I do use Twitter now!! http://www.twitter.com/andrewmunn

This WordPress theme is gorgeous!  Checkout the Javascript rollover effects on the links on the left! Snazzy.

Greg Burgoon is a Waterloo Computer Science student in his final year.  He is a colleague of mine at Xtreme Labs and has agreed to write a post on my blog.  Take it away Greg! “So, I was sitting today, thinking ‘Man, i feel like writing….’ and BAM, Andrew was like ‘I’ll let you do [...]

My blog is up and running after been down for a while. I’m now hosted on NFS, which charges by the bandwidth and HD space used, so don’t comment too much . Unfortunately many of my older posts have encoding errors which have added random characters. This is the result of a database dump mistake. [...]

At my coop job this summer I’ve had the pleasure of developing mobile applications for the Android, Blackberry, and Symbian platforms.  The contrast between the three from a developer’s point of view is striking, especially for me because I ported an application between all three. The first platform I was introduced to was Google’s Android. [...]