Do you really save receipts for your business purchases? Its a huge pain and usually not worth your time. But since the data is already in an electronic format somewhere (e.g. the vendor you bought from), then what if you could simply get that version quickly and easily? You could simplify your tax compliance without doing much work. Finally found a solution to tackle this head on -- Greenback.com.
With the release of JDK 8 M7 on June 13, 2013, the upcoming Java 8 release is now feature complete. Even though its final release is roughly 9 months from now, I wanted to give some of its new features a try. I believe Java v8 will be the most significant release since Java v5 with its support for closures via Project Lambda.
After taking the last few months off after leaving Twitter, I finally had the time to focus on my personal website. Built using a technology stack of Play Framework 2.1, Java, Scala, Lucene, MySQL, Nginx, Bootstrap, and Amazon EC2. Having worked in a primarily Ruby on Rails environment at Twitter the last 3 years, it was a breath of fresh air to work with the Play Framework. It does everything Rails is good at, but with the reliability, maturity, and scalability of Java.
The MIT Entrepreneurship Review published a great article titled The Unexotic Undercass by C.Z. Nnaemeka. I found myself agreeing with most of its arguments. Many of today's startups focus on creating solutions to problems that don't really exist. Having focused more than a decade on mobile startups, premium ringtone services immediately jumped out as one of those ideas that didn't pass my sniff test when they were hot in the mid-2000s. Eventually, the market killed them. If you're an entrepreneur, its definitely an article worth checking out.