The #EpicProvoAnnoucement hashtag on twitter has truly turned out to be epic. Provo is getting Google Fiber and it makes sense for so many reasons: Entrepreneurship – Provo is one of the best places for tech startups outside of Silicon Valley — on the same level as Austin. Infrastructure – There’s an existing infrastructure in place, put there by the city of Provo nearly 10 years ago. It failed (IMO) due to the greed of who decided to limit the speeds to near cable-levels and charge only marginally lower than other providers. Stiffling innovation in the pursuit of some extra...

This resonates extremely well for me: “There’s still a traditional view out there that agile methods, hacking, open-source and new technologies don’t have a place in serious business. Our view is that all of those wonderful things power people, businesses, and society forward. We’re obsessed with how things work, are inspired by change, and simply love to build stuff. So we hire people and take on projects that let us do just that.” from http://www.controlgroup.com/careers.html

As a java/OO developer first (web later), I got my start with databases by setting up a couple wordpress blogs, mostly simple UI stuff, but configuration and a few other cases got me into phpMyAdmin and MySQL. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case for hundreds, or thousands of others. I don’t — or didn’t — mind MySQL so much because honestly it got the job done for those simple blogs and it was easy to get going. However I will say that now that I am surrounded by “production-level” projects, i.e. projects at work that affect millions of users and...

This little code snippet will let you mark invalid textfields by giving them a red border, then removing the red border once valid.  It could be further adapted to go red or not after each character is typed by performing the check in UITextField’s textField:shouldChangeCharactersInRange delegate method.

I’ve been using the Nexus 4 for about three weeks now and I have to say, it is awesome.  It’s smooth, comfortable, and super sexy.  I absolutely love how it feels in my hand and when in use.  My smartphone history includes iPhone 2G, iPhone 4, Motorola Atrix, iPhone 4S, and Samsung Galaxy Nexus (and many other Android devices for testing), and this phone definitely takes the cake in terms of OS superiority and aesthetic.  Jelly Bean has really evolved from Android’s dark days.  The operating system is clean, helpful, and extremely customizable.  Getting live data on my home...

This post is long in the coming… actually should have been written at the end of November.  Brief recap about Growing Pains and how it took home some awesome awards in the BYU Mobile App Competition.  We had big plans for Growing Pains, but at the time of the submission deadline we were probably only 40-50% done, even with our first iteration feature set, and I honestly was not expecting to take home much from the competition.  The one award I was fairly confident about going into it was the best Ruby on Rails backend, mostly because I was guessing that we were one of the only RoR backends. My...