Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about my career and where it’s going. I don’t want to give the impression that I have never thought about my career before, but now the thoughts are becoming constant.

There is always strong debate around databases and their role in development. Sometimes they are considered components, while others will consider them infrastructure. Is there a right answer? Let's discuss!

There is one, and only one, primary focus that any software developer acknowledge: the ability for software to be maintainable. Of course, correctness, functionality, and performance are all important, these will always be easier to address with maintainable software.

So I bought myself a pinball machine this Christmas, Space Station (1987 Williams). It is fully functional and plays awesome. However, owning a pinball machine brings its own challenges. Keeping it running in tip-top shape isn't as simple as you'd initially think. It's almost an artform.

There are many models for the mind, varying in different attributes. Some people have broken them up into 5 attributes: Intelligence, Knowledge, Wisdom, Discernment, and Temperament. Others only consider the idea of intelligence, separating them into 9 Types of Intelligence. Still others mix these concepts into Knowledge and Intelligence. I don't believe these concepts are complex, but need a better separation, a cleaner boundary.

Our lives are intertwined with each other whether it's directly or indirectly. Processes must work together to bring about solutions and engineers must understand how pieces fit together like a puzzle. When writing code line by line, or executing a business process step by step, success depends on the execution of the previous line of code (step) and passes on those results to the next. This is an inescapable truth about our existence, the truth about how time works; the nature of cause and effect.

The software industry is young, immature, bloated by a large swath of "hackers", self-taught from within its own system of immaturity. It's like teenagers still in high school offering to teach other teenagers the meaning of life when they have yet to even experience it...

Sometimes reality hits you in a hard way. Only when you think you knew it all, then BLAM. It strikes. That's what happened to me a few days ago.

The Raspberry Pi is a little computer that you can get for as low as US $35 and on which you can run many different types of software and build many different projects. In this article, I’m going to guide you through the process of setting it up as a home development server and deploying a full-stack JavaScript application that you can access from outside your network. This is great for setting up your own remote digital workspace, or simply to have control over the hardware you use for development.

Scalable Vector Graphics (or SVGs) are an XML-based vector image format for 2-dimensional graphics. Although SVGs have been around for a while, they haven’t really taken off until recently. However, if you’re a web developer or graphics design artist working with online graphics, you may find SVGs to be a valuable additional to your skills.

Is the idea of invention the same as innovation? Or is it different? Are all inventors innovators? How do you know if your idea is an innovation or and invention? At SparcPoint, we thrive in innovation. It's not that we don't love invention, it's just more difficult in its truest sense and can't be taught.

Gradient Descent is an optimization algorithm used to find the local minimum of a function of infinite complexity. This is why it is such a useful mathematical tool.

When working with the Raspberry Pi there are a number of essential commands that should be known. If you're a linux guru, skip this post. But if you're new to the whole Raspberry Pi trend and linux, will need a quick understanding of some of the basic commands to work with.

Capacitors. A small, basic electronic component. It is used in so many ways. And yet, you probably know very little about them. The capacitor is 1 of 3 basic passive components in electrical engineering. It has the ability to store electric fields as voltage changes. Let's see a real world version of one of these components.

You don’t need a blank slate to change the world. Entirely new or novel ideas are often rare, exhausting, and costly. By its definition however, innovation requires only that we alter or change what already exists. We tend to mentally avoid this type of innovation. Faced with the thought of standing on the shoulders of giants, we find this interpretation lazy or opportunistic or worse, parasitic. In actuality, this type of innovation has provided some of most critical and successful innovations in the world today.

Microsoft has brought to us a new SDK: Bot Framework. Bots, or conversation agents, are becoming a fast growing part of our typical UX. Microsoft has given us the ability to use bots in a more general way always us, the developers, to innovate. Let's talk about how to use them!

Inductors. A small, basic electronic component. It is used in so many ways. And yet, you probably know very little about them. The inductor is 1 of 3 basic passive components in electrical engineering. It has the ability to store magnetic fields as current changes direction. Let's see a real world version of one of these components.

Wireless Power Transfer. A task originally started by Tesla, and being continued by countless others. There are two main ways to perform power transfer through the air: Induction (Magnetic Coupling), and Radiation. Let's briefly discuss both.

Complex Matrices. Most people know numbers. Fewer know about complex numbers. And a subset of those people know about representing complex numbers as matrices, allowing (albeit limited) algebra in the form of matrices. By uses matrix algebra and the structure being presented, unique and efficient algorithms can be generated. But of course, I'll let you figure those out!

WordNet is lexical database for the english language created at Princeton University in the Cognitive Science Lab around 1985. Since then it has been updated several times and is currently at version 3.1 (2012). The significance of this database is far reaching and important especially in natural language processing (NLP).

The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is a new cross-device framework for developers that allows for a single App (Foreground/Background) to be installed on any Windows 10 device. This provides us the ability to create a singular application with the ability to be deployed to many different types of devices including: PC, Mobile, Raspberry Pi, Tablets, XBox One, etc.

Hexadecimal and other numerical base systems are used in so many aspects of science and engineering, including software engineering. It is important to understand how Decimals, Hexadecimals, and Binary numbers interact with each other how they are converted. This post is meant to help show you how and why these bases exists and how to use them effectively in your endeavors.

The Windows IoT Core on Raspberry Pi allows for you to create Foreground and Background Apps. Both have their place in the development cycle or more complex systems. For Home Automation, it seems better to have a background app that can run without an interface. This allows less processing and memory consumption when trying to perform complex tasks. This article walks you through the basics of creating a skeleton for a Background App for the Raspberry Pi and enabling Remote Debugging.

With any Internet of Things (IoT) hardware, we must have an operating system (os) installed to interact with it. Here we show how to install the Windows 10 IoT OS on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B device.

SparcPoint.com has finally launched. It is a great day for innovators and those with an entrepreneurial spirit.