
My name is Rod Hilton and I’m a software engineer located in Colorado.
I have been in the tech industry for nearly 20 years, primarily working on the JVM with Scala, Java, and Groovy, with some Ruby and Python stuff on the side. I've primarily worked on distributed backend service development, though I have dabbled in full-stack work over the years.
This blog mostly focuses on my fascination with technical topics and my professional life, but one time I made a post about Star Wars, and now it's 98% of my traffic.
Featured Posts
Retro Gaming Setup: A Beginner's Guide
Smart Assholes: A Probing Examination
Strengths Only: A Peer-Review Philosophy
A Branching Strategy Simpler than GitFlow: Three-Flow
Star Wars Machete Order: Update and FAQ
The Star Wars Saga: Introducing Machete Order
Post Archive
- Programming Podcasts: A Roundup - May 2018
- Software Engineering Guiding Principles - Part 2 - June 2016
- Software Engineering Guiding Principles - Part 1 - June 2016
- My StrengthsFinder Results - April 2016
- Testing Against Template Renders in Grails - August 2015
- QCon New York 2015: A Review - July 2015
- Uploading a Jekyll Site to Rackspace Cloudfiles - July 2014
- The Worst Programming Interview Question - June 2014
- Top 10 Career-Changing Programming Books - February 2014
- CenturyLink: Traps and Caps - December 2013
- Diving Into Android - August 2013
- OSCON 2013: A Review - July 2013
- Book Review: Presentation Patterns - June 2013
- Brief Thoughts on Software Craftsmanship - February 2013
- A Stroll Through the Complexity Zoo - December 2012
- Scala Second Impressions - October 2012
- Book Review: The Career Programmer - October 2012
- Getting "Real Work" Done - October 2012
- Traveling Salesperson: The Most Misunderstood Problem - September 2012
- Need-Driven Development - August 2012
- Personal Wiki using GitHub and Gollum on OS X - May 2012
- Computer Science and Telescopes - February 2012
- Scala First Impressions - December 2011
- Why The Complete Bipartite Graph K3,3 Is Not Planar - October 2011
- I Broke Your Code, And It's Your Fault - October 2011
- Magic Variables Aren't Always Magic - September 2011
- Moving One Git Repository Into Another As A Subdirectory - September 2011
- Mechanics of Good Pairing - August 2011
- Conditionally Running Tests With JUnit 4 - August 2011
- What Is Technical Debt? - August 2011
- Be Careful With Clover in Jenkins - August 2011
- Ubuntu, Tomcat, Jenkins, Git, and SSH Together - July 2011
- When To Work On Technical Debt - July 2011
- Building a Résumé With Templator - June 2011
- A Different Kind of Technical Interview - May 2011
- Adding 'Dont Hyphenate Classname" Support to Hyphenator - May 2011
- Agile With a Capital “A” Vs. agile With a Lowercase “a”. - September 2010
- Finding High-Impact Areas for Refactoring - July 2010
- Certifications Aren't "Bad" (They Just Aren't "Good," Either) - April 2010
- Avoiding The Big Design Interview Question - April 2010
- You Have To Buy It Twice Before It’s Cheap - January 2010
- Quantitatively Evaluating Test-Driven Development - December 2009
- Units are Not Classes: Improving Unit Testing By Removing Artificial Boundaries - November 2009
- My Personal 3 Pillars of Job Satisfaction - August 2009
- How To: Convert Audible .aa Files to .mp3 Quickly - August 2009
- Enhancement vs. Defect: More Than Pedantry - August 2009
- Book Review: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning - July 2009
- 5 Ways To Hose Your Estimates - July 2009
- How I Lost 90 Pounds in One Year - May 2009
- Managing The Firehose: Controlling RSS Through Pipes - March 2009
- I Love Pair-Programming - February 2009
- Book Review: The Art of Agile Development - February 2009
- My Least Favorite Interview Question - December 2008
- Apple: Semi-First Impressions - December 2008
- Listing Only Java Processes - October 2008
- Fixing WAYD (What Are You Doing) Plugin for Gnome Deskbar 2.20.0 - July 2008
- Blue Sage Realty Sucks: "I'm Rejecting Your Application. Get Out." - July 2008
- Getting A Java Object's Refence ID - June 2008
- Passed The Java Developer Exam! - June 2008
- Assert_tag With Two Siblings In Rails - April 2008
- Setting JAVA_HOME in a Batch File - April 2008
- Using Multiple Versions Of Rails - March 2008
- Changing Logging Behavior of Rails via Extensions - February 2008
- Java Compiler Generating Secret Methods - October 2007
- Language Marathon: First Impressions of Ruby, Python, and C#. - September 2007
- Saying Goodbye To Windows - January 2007
- Using Western Digital NetCenter with Ubuntu Linux - January 2007
- My Interview With Google - December 2006
- Coldfusion's Compiler - December 2006
- Passed The SCWCD Exam! - September 2006
- Java 5 Global Exception Handling - June 2006
- Password Change Policies - April 2006
- The Innovation Paradox - March 2006
- Bypassing an OK-Only Message Box - February 2006
- Getting Remote IP Address In Axis - January 2006
- Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo - January 2006
- How To Set Up 2 Java JDKs With Eclipse - January 2006