Development

There was a question today on Twitter about how to go about finding the word with the most consecutive consonants in the dictionary file. Of course, being a typical developer, when presented with a problem – I am usually not satisfied until I find a solution. Since I am interested in learning Clojure, I thought I would try to solve this problem functionally. Armed with Stuart Halloway’s “Programming Clojure” and trusty Google by my side, I embarked on my first Clojure mission. ...

_Photo by Valentin Baranovsky - Uliana Lopatkina and Danila Korsuntsev. _ Many moons ago, I spent a couple of years dancing with a ballet company. You wouldn’t think that much of that experience would transfer to development projects, but I give you an example in partnership, the can be applicable straight from the ballet world to the software world. The partnership in question is the one between the lead ballerina and the lead male dancer called a “pas de deux.” In many ballets, this dance involves the ballerina being a swan/princess and the male dancer being a prince/sorcerer. But in my example, it really doesn’t matter that much. The only important point is that they are the best dancers in the whole company. ...

I am cruising along in my morning. I have a cup of tea in my hand and a good outlook on my tasks at hand. The code is flowing off of my fingertips. I am feeling pretty smart. Then the cloud moves in and the code darkens. I am at a roadblock. I try to google, I try debugging, I try calling in my fellow developers to see if they can see what the problem is… no luck. I bang my head unproductively for another hour and then go home. A fresh start in the morning and a fresh cup of day move me in a new direction, somehow I stumble upon the answer and quite frankly, it was so simple I can’t believe I missed it. I feel not so smart. This is one of the many smart-not-so-smart waves that rule the life of a developer. ...

I have always wanted to contribute to Open Source. I have reaped the benefits of using Open Source packages throughout the years, I sincerely want to give back. What has been stopping me all this time? Lack of time is my main excuse. I have two small children and by the time I clean up from dinner and get them bathed and off to bed, there is little time left to code. I tend to use this excuse for lots of other tasks that I avoid around the house, like closet cleaning, reorganizing the garage, etc … But an excuse is exactly what it is. ...

I attended my first NFJS conference last weekend up in Columbus. Overall, it was an excellent experience. The speakers were all first rate and I got a chance to hang out and meet some other like-minded people who are interested in giving up a weekend to learn new technologies and generally just geek-out. The main technologies that stood out to me are concurrency and semantic web. Concurrency and functional programming are becoming more and more important with the ability to scale out on the server, rather then scale up (horizontal vs vertical scaling). There is always some threshold to the amount of power that you can throw at one system. However, that limit disappears if you can spread the load out across many servers. Java runs into some real problems with threads and concurrency. For this reason, the functional languages like Scala, Erlang, and Clojure are really starting to shine. I was so impressed with Clojure, that I picked up a book for my “play around and take a look at” tech stack. ...

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? ...