I am an entrepreneur, software developer, author, and speaker. I love what I do.

Some of my work

Because it's my bag, I like building things. Hip things like Web Apps. I love writing about my experiences too.
easyb is a behavior driven development framework for the Java platform.
SimpleJDBC is a JDBC driver for Amazon's SimpleDB.
I host a weekly technical podcast series for IBM developerWorks.
Read my Development 2.0 column on IBM developerWorks.

Restoring a MongoDB instance

At App47, our production MongoDB instance is managed by MongoHQ — that is, we use their PaaS to host our data and leave the details of running and maintaining MongoDB instances up to them. It’s a handy service and worth … read more

Intro to MongoDB demo

MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, document-oriented schemaless database. This short demo, entitled “An Introduction to MongoDB“, provides a quick tour of its use, and helps you understand where it’s most applicable. You’ll see first hand how to leverage Mongo’s shell … read more

Queuing as a Service via Amazon’s SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) borrows what it needs from message-oriented middleware (MOM) but doesn’t lock you in to any one implementation language or framework. In this article, entitled “Cloud-based messaging with Amazon SQS” learn how to use Amazon SQS … read more

An introduction to Amazon SimpleDB

Follow along as this demo, entitled “An introduction to Amazon SimpleDB“, guides you through an introduction to SimpleDB, a massively scalable, highly available key/value datastore. Part of the Amazon Web Services suite, SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to … read more

JavaScript for Java developers

Java developers have historically perceived JavaScript as a toy language, both too lightweight for real programming and too clunky to be of use as a scripting alternative. And yet JavaScript is still around, and it’s the basis of exciting web … read more

Relational Database as a Service

Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) offloads the work of maintaining a database to Amazon Web Services, which makes it exceptionally easy to increase or swap out your application’s data storage. This article, entitled “Play-ing with Amazon RDS” revisits a location-based … read more

On migrating to the cloud

Considering moving into the cloud are you? Well then, have I got something for you! Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to catch up with Paul Duvall, the CTO of Stelligent and we, indeed, talked about this very … read more

Java EE testing with Arquillian

I recently caught up with my old friend, Dan Allen, who is a Red Hat principal software engineer and open source evangelist. In this podcast, he explains how Arquillian eases integration testing by providing a test harness to abstract away … read more

Rapid Android development with JRuby

A few interesting pieces of data: 70% of the world’s population has a mobile phone over a million Android devices are activated weekly 1/2 of all local searches are done on a mobile device over 90% of mobile Internet access … read more

The case for Node.js

Not too long ago, I wrote about JavaScript; specifically, I espoused it as a language worthy of a Java developers attention mainly due to the fact that JavaScript, while about as old as Java, is arguably the more popular language. … read more