As much as I love geeking out about basketball stats, I want to put a MongoDB data set out there that's a bit more app-friendly: the USDA SR25 nutrient database. You can download this data set from my S3 bucket here, and plug it into your MongoDB instance using mongorestore. I'm very meticulous about nutrition and have, at times, kept a food journal, but sites like FitDay and DailyBurn have far too much spam and are far too poorly designed to be a viable option. With this data set, I plan on putting together an open source web-based food journal in the near future. However, I encourage you to use this data set to build your own apps.
While math and computer science have been lumped together for about as long as the latter has existed, there's a lot of backlash recently toward the idea that a solid math background is integral to being a good developer. The relationship between the two was something that I struggled to grasp as an undergraduate in Computer Science. The relationship between math and CS isn't as direct as, say, math and physics, or even philosophy and CS. However, taking a rigorous pure math course as an undergraduate will help you significantly, whether you choose to be an ivory tower academic, a developer for the latest hip startup out of Silicon Valley, or an engineer for a big NYC bank.
If you're an avid podcast listener and online courseware consumer like I am, odds are you've gotten frustrated with how long it takes to listen to a single lecture. An hour-long podcast on Bulletproof Executive? 20 minutes listening to a TEDTalk from a HackDesign lesson? No offense to these awesome content creators, but ain't nobody got time for that.
When you are looking to run analytics on large and complex data sets, you might instinctively reach for Hadoop. However, if your data's in MongoDB, using the Hadoop connector seems like overkill if your data fits on your laptop. Luckily, MongoDB's built-in aggregation framework offers a quick solution for running sophisticated analytics right from your MongoDB instance without needing any extra setup.
You hear a lot about data binding in AngularJS, and with good reason: its at the heart of everything you do with Angular. I've mentioned data binding more than a few times in my guides to directives and filters, but I haven't quite explained the internals of how data binding work. To novices, it seems like straight sorcery, but, in reality, data binding is fundamentally very simple.
It's official: paleo was the most searched for health term on Google in 2013, and, thus, paleo is no longer weird. Well, maybe its still a little weird, but at least people don't look at me like I'm crazy when I order a bunless burger anymore. As a matter of fact, I meet a lot of people who want to try going paleo, but they're held back by aspects of the paleo lifestyle that seem beyond the pale to the average New York office worker.
My directives post seems to have gone over well. I've received emails and comments from readers expressing how much it helped them, so I figured I'd write a post about one of the simultaneously oldest, most useful, and most under appreciated AngularJS features.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the single most important quality that differentiates a good software developer from an excellent software developer is the ability to spend hours on a problem where he doesn't know if or when he'll find the correct answer. No matter how many unit tests you write or how disciplined your coding practice is, there will inevitably be bugs. Not only that, there will be those annoying, frustrating bugs that you can't seem to duplicate and you spend hours grinding your teeth trying to figure out why the damn thing doesn't work. As a matter of fact, when I'm conducting an interview, I often explicitly give people a question that is too difficult to solve in the allotted timeframe, just to see how well the interviewee deals with coming to the realization that they didn't "ace" the interview.
