I have been attending talks on functional programming languages at NFJS over the past couple of days. I have to admit it, I am really taken with the power of Scala and Clojure to tackle problems that Java cannot handle. I even purchased a Clojure book to add to my “languages to take a good hard look at” stack. I really believe that it is true that the functional languages have a lot to offer. ...
I think most developers are familiar with getting in the “zone”. The place you get when you are totally in focus and in the flow of development. The code comes quickly, the ideas are together and everything just seems to work. It is the sweet spot of productivity. I have found the best way for me to get into the zone is to put on my headphones, arrange some uninterrupted time and just start going. ...
How many minutes and hours have been wasted trying to decide if a ticket is a feature or a bug? Yes, I have been there, entering a new item ticket, the dropdown in the tracker glares at me. Decide! Is is a bug or a feature. Some are clear-cut, of course. The ever popular null-pointer on unvalidated input for example. But others are not so clear. What about the field that you thought was supposed to viewable employees in the supervisor’s location, but really ended up needing to be viewable to the employee’s in the supervisor’s location and the direct reports in another location? The question then turns on whether or not this information was in the “spec” or whether the business user didn’t let the developer know about it. Now the question has created an ugly situation of “blame”. Whose fault is it? ...
I felt like I was in a controlling relationship headed downhill. After two custom laptops returned for defective hardware, I wanted to leave. But leaving didn’t seem so easy after living in the walled garden of Apple all those years. This blog post is about how to leave your Mac and return to OSS. Make a New Plan, Stan There are quite a few nice alternatives to the Mac Air out there. I decided to go with the new Sputnik 3. Some of my reasons: ...