Hey there, I am Matt and this is my place on the web.
Take a look at my (ever incomplete) portfolio.
How to build a game like Flappy Bird with Xcode and SpriteKit
When I heard about Flappy Bird for the first time, the hype was already in its final phase: developer Dong Nguyen had decided to pull the app from the stores in “22 hours from now“. Apart from overreacting users and an allegedly daily advertising revenue of up to 50,000 US$, the simple game mechanics were something that caught my attention. The concept of clicking/tapping to keep the player on track wasn’t really an innovation in…
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Entrepreneurship
LeWeb 2010 startups revisited
Around the same time in 2011, I wrote a posting about the LeWeb 2010 finalists and startup success in general. I placed a reminder into my calendar to revisit the list in 2012 and went to check whether the companies were still alive and well. Unfortunately, I never released the post. Now, another year later, I saw the unreleased draft and decided to update it once again. Votizen – acquired by causes.com (open positions 11/2012:…
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Software Engineering
Tomcat 7 and Nginx on Ubuntu 10.12
Earlier last week, I installed Nginx with a Tomcat on a newly installed Ubuntu VPS. Unfortunately, although it comes with a lower memory footprint, it was noticably slower than my earlier Apache installation. It seemed like the simple proxying that I had in place was too slow. I decided to give the “APR based Apache Tomcat Native library” a try. Here’s what I did.
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Software Engineering
No signature of method addTo* is applicable
Last night, I started getting an exception in one of my pet projects, created with Grails: No signature of method: package.Parent.addToChildren() is applicable for argument types: (package.Child) values: [package.Child : null] Possible solutions: getChildren(). Stacktrace follows: groovy.lang.MissingMethodException: No signature of method: package.Parent.addToChildren() is applicable for argument types: (package.Child) values: [package.Child : null] I searched for the problem, read dozens of different hints regarding proper general ORM one-to-many setups, GORM-specific hasMany/belongsTo relationships, cascading, saving before adding,…
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Software EngineeringEnabling Tomcat NIO Connector with Grails 2.0
At dozens of different sources, even in Graeme Rocher’s corresponding Jira ticket, it says that you need to put grails.tomcat.nio=true into your Config.groovy file. I believed that, too, and it drove me nuts to see that the org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol class wasn’t even instantiated. I had to review the commit logs to figure out that the property should actually be in the BuildConfig.groovy file. Now I finally got the log messages that I expected to see… |…
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Software Engineering
MongoDB: can only have 1 index plugin / bad index key pattern
While working with MongoDB and the MongoDB Java driver I got the following exception when attempting to iterate over a result set. com.mongodb.MongoException: can only have 1 index plugin / bad index key pattern at com.mongodb.MongoException.parse(MongoException.java:82) at com.mongodb.DBApiLayer$MyCollection.__find(DBApiLayer.java:312) at com.mongodb.DBCursor._check(DBCursor.java:369) at com.mongodb.DBCursor._hasNext(DBCursor.java:498) at com.mongodb.DBCursor.hasNext(DBCursor.java:523) This exception drove me nuts. I checked the index definition in Java, which looked fine, compared it to the index result in Mongo shell (db.collectionName.getIndexes()), which looked fine too, made several…
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Software EngineeringUsing Grails without a database
If you’re using Grails for a frontend without direct database access, there are four things you need to do. Remove Grails’ Hibernate plugin. Delete the datasource configuration file conf/DataSource.groovy Explicitly declare services as non-transactional. The default is true and your class methods would be proxied, but without the Hibernate plugin there is no transaction manager and the deployment will fail. Use command objects instead of domain objects, particularly if you need validation.
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Entrepreneurship
9 out of 10 startups fail
Disclaimer: I’ve chosen a rather provocative title for this posting. It has no qualified basis but it’s something you hear very often in one way or another. 7 out of 10 fail, 9 out of 10 fail, etc. I was interested in whether there’s any truth in this startup-scene meme, so I took some time to walk through 13 startups who presented 30 second pitches at Web 2.0 summit 2010, a little more than one…
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Software EngineeringDeprecation of ConfigurationHolder in Grails 2
While porting my Grails applications to 2.0 RC1, I recognized that ConfigurationHolder is now deprecated. The new way to access the configuration is through dependency injection of the grailsApplication bean. Before 2.0: With 2.0:
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Software EngineeringGrails cheat sheet
This is a little cheat sheet I created for learning purposes. I’m extending this as I need. Many of the tips are collected from the Getting Started With Grails minibook, which is a great resource for a kickstart. All stuff after the break… click “Continue” to continue reading.
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Software EngineeringLearning Grails the hard way: Facebook Authentication
Every now and then I try to explore a new programming language. Last year, I tried Scala, this year, I’m fiddling around with Grails. My first attempt was to try something I already implemented in other languages, like verifying Facebook’s signed_request. It’s fun to see what I tried to get it running and how a short version by a more experienced Groovy coder looks like. Compare both versions after the break if you like.
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Software Engineering
Android Application Development Tips: Disabling scrollbars for WebView
Scrollbars for a WebView can be easily disabled from XML using the scrollbars attribute.
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Personal, Software Engineering
arcadiaCharts public alpha released
The wait has come to an end and it’s quite a relief to finally be able to write about (and promote) something I’ve been involved in my spare time, mainly in 2009 and partly in 2010 as well. In December 2008 I had the pleasure to meet members of the management board of element5, one of the world’s largest outsourcing partners for the software industry, who were just kicking off a new little project: a…