Recent Blog Posts
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Inbox Zero is Hard for Me
By Johanna Rothman - Tuesday Jan, 6This year, after I archived my last year’s inbox, I decided my email problem was getting worse, not better. “I’m Johanna Rothman, and I have a problem collecting email in my inbox.&#... more »
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Career Survey
By Jared Richardson - Sunday Jan, 4The upcoming Career 2.0 book is in high gear, but we'd like to include more than our experiences. Over on the Career 2.0 blog we've posted a few questions about your career. Best moves, worst experien... more »
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Tactics vs. Strategy (SOA & The Tarpit of Irrelevancy)
By Neal Ford - Friday Jan, 2This is the first in a series of blog posts where I discuss what I see wrong with SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) in the way that it's being sold by vendors. The first installment is about how the... more »
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Collaborating with Other Writers
By Johanna Rothman - Friday Jan, 2Merlin, via 43 Folders Clips has a video of Eric Idle, on John Cleese?s Approach to Writing. Aside from John Cleese’s specificity, Idle talks about how he had trouble finding collaborators until... more »
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Happy New Year
By Johanna Rothman - Thursday Jan, 1Everyone, I thank you for reading and commenting. I hope you have a healthy and happy 2009. ... more »
Posted by:
Neal Ford
on 11/07/2008
I am sometimes asked about my position on code comments, and, like most things, I have strong opinions about it. Two kinds of comments exist:JavaDoc-style comments (which encompasses JavaDoc, XMLDoc, RDoc, etc), which are designed to produce developer documentation at a high level (class and method names and what they do)In-line comments, generally scattered around the code to indicate a note from developer to developerBoth kinds of comments represent different smells, each with different... more »
Posted by:
Matthew Bass
on 11/03/2008
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” ? John Adams
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Posted by:
Ken Sipe
on 10/18/2008
Occasionally crazy analogies pop up in my head. Sometimes these ideas don't make sense to anyone but me. Let me know if I've gone off the deep end.So I was thinking what it was like growing up when I didn't have a microwave and how useful that tool is. Then it occurred to me that as useful as it is, there are things I would never put in the microwave. Take for instance a turkey. Perhaps it is possible to cook a turkey in a microwave, but why? You can cook toast on a gas stove as... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 10/31/2008
Is Scala, which was designed only a short while ago (comparatively speaking, that is) poised for stardom? Or will Clojure achieve greatness instead? There are a number of complementary aspects that seem to indicate for the time being that Scala might; however, what remains to be seen is if Scala can stand above recent newcomer Clojure. Both languages often show up together, especially when the topic of conversation is concurrency; nevertheless, each language is distinctly different.... more »
Posted by:
Neal Ford
on 09/06/2008
When things are automated, you just forget about them. And that's a good thing: you'd rather spend your time thinking about important things, like "is my design correct" or "should I be refactoring now". Developers who haven't embraced continuous integration yet spend way too much time doing something (builds) that are better left to automation. At the No Fluff, Just Stuff shows, one of the Sunday poll questions for the crowd is "How many are using continuous integration?" I'm always... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 09/03/2008
Back in the Age of Aquarius, hip cats could somewhat quickly knock out an account creation web page (for basically any web application) that contained a few form fields, such as account name and password to name few. Those days are gone, however, with the proliferation of various nefarious bots that annoy basically everyone except [...]
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Posted by:
Jared Richardson
on 09/23/2008
Many of us are familiar with The Pragmatic Programmer. One of the better known concepts from the book is broken windows.
The idea behind broken windows is simple. Once a single window in a building is broken, the other windows are more likely to be broken and the building vandalized. The only way to keep the entire building in good shape is timely repairs.
The concept maps well to compiles and automated tests. Keep them clean and creeping problems never get a foothold in your... more »
Posted by:
Jared Richardson
on 09/16/2008
I might put this in blog long term, but wanted to experiment with Trip It's new blog badge feature.
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Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 09/08/2008
The SOA space has been interesting to watch over the past few years; indeed, things recently become quite intriguing with the recent release of MuleSource’s Mule Galaxy, which is an open source SOA governance platform with an integrated registry and repository. If the description of Galaxy seems like a mouthful, then you’ll definitely want to listen to a conversation I recently had the honor of having with Dan Diephouse for JavaWorld’s Java Technology Insider.
Dan is the... more »
Posted by:
Mark Johnson
on 08/07/2008
At the Columbus NFJS show held on July 25-27th during one of the BOF sessions Dave Bock, Scott Davis and I discussed unit tests vs functional tests. As we all have been taught to believe that unit tests will help improve software quality. Many of the BOF attendants commented that writing Unit tests help them think about their code organization which has the affect to improve code quality. In fact most everyone in the room defended the need for writing Unit tests using tools such as JUnit... more »
Posted by:
Ken Sipe
on 08/21/2008
A number of the Java memory management tools with the default distribution on Mac OS X Leopard are broken. The information to repair the situation seems to be hard to come by. This post will detail the steps necessary to get jmap and jhat to work on a Mac for Java 6. I assume that Java 5 has the same issue but haven't checked.Setting up a test Java process to profile.1. From the terminal: cd /Developer/Examples/Java/JFC/Java2D/2. From the terminal: java -jar Java2D.jar &3. After the... more »
Posted by:
Ryan Shriver
on 08/07/2008
I?m sitting in the Toronto airport on the way home, wrapping up the week at Agile 2008. I?m leaving a day early so I won?t see Thursday afternoon or Friday morning sessions, but I did see enough to form some opinions on the state of Agile:Is Bigger Better? - I heard there were 1,525 people registered for the conference and it sure seemed like it. What a big conference. The agile community continues to grow and become more mainstream, but I?m not so sure this is a good thing. I think things... more »
Posted by:
Ken Sipe
on 08/28/2008
I can't help but believe that there has to be a better way. There has to be more options...I talking about the I/O options to my computer. Here are a couple of recent stories that will hopefully bring context to what I mean.Gestures on the MacRecently I purchased a new MacBook Pro. You know, one of the new Macs with the multi-touch capabilities. The idea is that if you use one finger you move the mouse, if you use 2 fingers it scrolls (and not just up and down), if you use 3 fingers... more »
Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 07/08/2008
Dwayne’s comment on my post, Architecting from the Features, made me realize I hadn’t provided an example of how I’d changed the book. Head slap on me! One of my rules of writing, which I use when I’m revising because I rarely remember as I’m writing the first draft, is to explain what I’m writing with an example. Examples can be a “for instance”, a story, an anecdotes–anything that connects my writing to the reader. Some people like... more »
Posted by:
Venkat Subramaniam
on 05/28/2008
I am a coder at heart. I like to twiddle bits, do cool stuff at the language, API, and lower levels. I am terrible when it comes to creating good user experience, but I know that.
So, when I create apps, I ask others to use it. I ask them what they like, what they
don't like, and what they'd like to see improve. And, I do this from the first day
I start writing the app. I know that user involvement is one of the key to success.
What is a good application? I'd say it is the one... more »
Posted by:
Venkat Subramaniam
on 05/12/2008
A few weeks ago I was writing a method in Groovy that needed to return three different results, two strings and one array. As I was writing it, I said to myself, "this code is ugly, I wish I could return multiple values from methods in Groovy."
Here is an example similar to the method I had written:
def details(full_name, address, contact_numbers)
{
// ignoring stuff to process data
full_name.append('Venkat Subramaniam')
address.append("Venkat's... more »
Posted by:
Ryan Shriver
on 05/07/2008
A central theme in my business value presentations is the notion of ???measurable business value??? and that agile methods, such as Scrum and XP, don???t have a built-in mechanism designed to provide this. Essentially, agile methods alone aren???t enough to measure the value delivered by teams to their stakeholders.I learned this myself only after years of practicing agile, so I guess it makes sense that this wouldn???t be the first thing picked up by folks new to agile. But for those... more »
Posted by:
Neal Ford
on 05/15/2008
The shortness of the collective memory of the development world depresses me sometimes. Joel Spolsky has a great blog post from 2004 entitled How Microsoft Lost the API War. In it, he describes the real Microsoft crown jewel that lead to their domination of the personal computer: the Win32 API. If you were writing software in the mid-90's, you were writing it to the Win32 API. You might be using Visual BASIC, Delphi, PowerBuilder, Visual Objects (all 2 of it's users), FoxPro, dBASE for... more »
Posted by:
Jared Richardson
on 05/14/2008
Erlang keeps popping up. This article is about a very practical, real-world integration of Erlang with popular technologies.
Facebook Chat
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Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 05/06/2008
I’m particular about two things: calling a prose plan a project plan and calling a Gantt chart (or yellow stickies) a schedule. One of my colleagues emailed me last week, explaining he’d spent a week developing a project plan and was hoping I could take a look at it. “Sure,” I said. “Send it along.”
He did. It was a Gantt chart for the next three months, with one- and two-week tasks. I called him and asked for a project plan, with release criteria. Did... more »
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