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.

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