Blogs
Interview About Pragmatic Ways to Manage Technical Debt
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 02/22/2013
I had a great time recording an interview last week with Carolyn Seaman for OnTechnicalDebt.com. The interview is over at Pragmatic Ways for Your IT Team to Deal with Technical Debt. Alexandra queued us up. Carolyn and I had a great time discussing technical debt. I even managed to mention Chris Sterling’s book Managing Software Debt (which I really like and still have yet to write my review). Listen to the other interviews on the site. I found them fascinating, especially the one with...more »
Utah JUG: Client/Server Apps with Play Framework, HTML5 and Java
Posted by: James Ward on 02/21/2013
Tonight (Feburary 21, 2013) I will be presenting at the Utah JUG about Client/Server Apps with Play Framework, HTML5 and Java. Here is the session description: The web application landscape is rapidly shifting back to a Client/Server architecture. This time around, the Client is JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in the browser. The tools and deployment techniques for these types of applications are abundant and fragmented. This session will teach you how to pull together jQuery, LESS, Twitter,...more »
Hiring Geeks That Fit is Available at the Pragmatic Bookshelf
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 02/21/2013
Drum roll please… I am very pleased to announce that Hiring Geeks That Fit is also available at the Pragmatic Bookshelf! I self-published the book at leanpub, and announced it over on Hiring Technical People, and have been writing about it in my newsletter for a few months. And, not everyone knew about it. I asked the Prags if they would carry it, so that people familiar with my books could buy it, and they said yes. I am thrilled. Here’s what the Prags say on their site: This book...more »
Hunt the Wumpus
Posted by: Ken Sipe on 02/20/2013
From the screen snapshot... what is wrong?ok... it is using maven... what else?ever seen a C: on a unix... good times!, apparently the tests build this out. Let's hope the day gets better than this :)more »
Java 6 End of Life
Posted by: Ken Sipe on 02/19/2013
It may be important to note for companies running on Java, that Java 6 (probably the most common JVM platform for most of my enterprise customers) will reach it's EOL this month, Feb 2013.Time to be moving to Java 7 if you haven't yet!more »
Bumping Into Manager Rules
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 02/19/2013
You might have met a manager on a bad manager day. Equally as frustrating is when you work for a manager who has rules about problem solving. I once worked for a manager who proudly said to me, “Don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution.” I blinked once and said, “Why would I bring you a problem I could solve?” He stopped, and said, “Ooh.” Some of you will recognize that as the programmer’s refrain. “Oooh,” is what you say...more »
DevNexus 2013: Architecting Event-Driven Web, Mobile, and RESTful Apps & Introduction to Play Framework
Posted by: James Ward on 02/18/2013
At DevNexus 2013 I will be giving two talks: Architecting Event-Driven Web, Mobile, and RESTful Apps Non-blocking, asynchronous, and reactive are all the rage today. This session will explore why the patterns are important in modern apps and how to apply them to event-driven web, mobile, and RESTful apps. To illustrate the concepts, Java, Scala, Akka, and Play Framework will be used as examples. Introduction to Play Framework The Play Framework is a lightweight, stateless web framework for...more »
Interview With Greg Geracie Posted
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 02/18/2013
I did a little bit of work for the ProdBOK (the Product Management Body of Knowledge) earlier in 2012. It was a little bit of work. I had an opportunity to meet Greg Geracie, along with some other very nice people. When the BOK comes out, at some point later this year, I’ll get to see what they used of my suggestions. In the meantime, Greg interviewed me on his blog. We spoke about scaling agile and my work for the ProdBOK. Being a product manager, a product owner, a...more »
Agile User stories and Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
Posted by: Paul Rayner on 02/15/2013
On Monday night at our DDD Denver meetup we ended up having a valuable and lively group discussion using a modified “Lean Coffee” format. The four questions we covered (in order) were: Where to start in developing a domain model? What is the biggest hurdle for a team adopting DDD? What is the intersection of DDD & agile user stories? Techniques for implementing DDD across geographically dispersed teams As we discussed the intersection of DDD and user stories, I mentioned a...more »
Word Document to Asciidoc Conversion
Posted by: Paul Rayner on 02/14/2013
I had content in Word documents that I needed to convert to Asciidoc for our book. Here are the steps I found to work best: Save Word doc as HTML Encode as UTF-8 Use pandoc to convert from HTML to AsciiDoc Use Sublime Text 2 search and replace (using some regular expressions) to strip out crazy things Use Sublime Text 2 to perform any remaining formatting Save Word doc as HTML Open the document in Word, and then save as a web page. Select the “Save only Display Information into...more »
Think Small: Five Tips for Agile Program Management Posted
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 02/12/2013
I have an article posted on projectmanagement.com. Think Small: Five Tips for Agile Program Management is up. I’ve been quite busy with client work, and was too exhausted to blog. (I know, can you imagine??) Please comment over there. more »
Ever Have a Bad Manager Day?
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 02/11/2013
I wish I could tell you I never had a bad manager day. I wish I could tell you I never screwed up. Nope, that would be a very tall tale. Here’s a doozy. I once told one of my employees to leave his emotions at the door. Yes, I really said that. Luckily, he was smarter than I was. He said, “That’s like leaving an arm or a leg. Which one of those would you like me to leave at home today?” Oh. Oops. I blinked. Bad manager day. I said, “That was one of the more stupid...more »
Colors when viewing folders in Terminal
Posted by: Paul Rayner on 02/07/2013
Saw directory listing coloring at Golden Ruby Users Group this week, and needed to have it! LsColors LS_COLORS='di=1:fi=0:ln=31:pi=5:so=5:bd=5:cd=5:or=31:mi=0:ex=35:*.rpm=90' export LS_COLORS ls, colors and Terminal.app Customize Your Colors The values in LSCOLORS are codes corresponding to different colors for different types of files. The letter you use indicates which color to use, and the position in the string indicates what type of file should be that color. Each color comes in pairs...more »
Array Slicing in Ruby
Posted by: Paul Rayner on 02/07/2013
I’ve found the Ruby Koans to be brilliant for exposing a learner to aspects of the language that are not obvious, or even weird, at first glance. Indexing Ruby Arrays For example, let’s look at a koan for accessing array elements: def test_accessing_array_elements array = [:peanut, :butter, :and, :jelly] assert_equal :peanut, array[0] assert_equal :peanut, array.first assert_equal :jelly, array[3] assert_equal :jelly, array.last assert_equal :jelly, array[-1] ...more »
New Year Commitments
Posted by: Ken Sipe on 02/07/2013
Looking to recommit to this tech blog... so what to expect from 2013Conferenceslooking forward to a new year with NFJSDoing more Groovy this year with Gradle and SpockPoland YAY! love Poland!GeeCon 201333rd DegreeJavaZone 2013 in OsloUberConf 2013that's what is scheduled currentlyBlog PostsI'm going try to post more frequently... and probably on themed subjects... are couple that come to mind:Lessons from clients:) Tech Review or highlight of components / frameworksIf you have...more »
Object Ids in Ruby
Posted by: Paul Rayner on 02/06/2013
In my effort to master Ruby this year, I started this morning working through Ruby Koans. I just completed these tests and was intrigued by the comment in the second koan: def test_some_system_objects_always_have_the_same_id assert_equal 0, false.object_id assert_equal 2, true.object_id assert_equal 4, nil.object_id end def test_small_integers_have_fixed_ids assert_equal 1, 0.object_id assert_equal 3, 1.object_id assert_equal 5, 2.object_id assert_equal 201, 100.object_id #...more »
Blogging with Octopress and Github Pages
Posted by: Paul Rayner on 02/04/2013
Why Octopress? Here are 4 good reasons from AlBlue’s blog to consider using Octopress for a technical blog: Jekyll-based Markdown content Stylish Plugins See also Octopress Is Pretty Great, which has a great description of not only the positives of Octopress, but also a good step-by-step summary of how to configure Octopress for your environment. The Jekyll-style approach is to write content in an author-friendly text format (i.e. Markdown) that is then translated to HTML and served...more »
DeveloperWeek 2013: Modern Web Apps With Scala and Play
Posted by: James Ward on 02/04/2013
Tomorrow (February 5, 2013) I will be presenting about Modern Web Apps With Scala and Play at DeveloperWeek in San Francisco. Here is the session description: The web application architecture is rapidly evolving to accommodate mobile, more interactive experiences, integrated real-time, and service composition. This session will teach you how to build modern web applications using Play Framework and Scala. You will learn the end-to-end architecture including: non-blocking service composition,...more »
Book Review: Implementing Domain-Driven Design
Posted by: Paul Rayner on 02/01/2013
This is a review of the book Implementing Domain-Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon, based on the Safari Books Online rough cut edition. The book is also currently available for preorder on Amazon.com, with a scheduled release date of February 14, 2013. Rather than try to cover everything, I’ll be focusing on the parts of the book that I found most interesting and helpful: highlighting the things that stood out to me. I have been a certified Domain Language DDD instructor for over two years now,...more »
Managing the Stream of Features in an Agile Program
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 01/24/2013
One of the challenges in a program is how you manage the checkins, especially if you have continuous integration. I am quite fond of continuous integration, no matter how large your program is. I also like short iterations. (Remember Short is Beautiful?) But imagine a product where you have a platform and layers. I’m separating the GUI and the API for the GUI, so you can see the application and the middleware and the platform. Now, this architecture is different from separate-but-related...more »
Why Attend the NFJS Tour?
- » Cutting-Edge Technologies
- » Agile Practices
- » Peer Exchange
Current Topics:
- Languages on the JVM: Scala, Groovy, Clojure
- Enterprise Java
- Core Java, Java 7
- Agility
- Testing: Geb, Spock, Easyb
- REST
- NoSQL: MongoDB, Cassandra
- Hadoop
- Spring 3
- Automation Tools: Git, Hudson, Sonar
- HTML5, Ajax, jQuery, Usability
- Mobile Applications - iPhone and Android
- More...
NFJS, the Magazine
On the road to learning
by Raju GandhiRefactoring to Modularity
by Kirk KnoernschildRESTful Groovy
by Kenneth KousenGetting Started with D3.js
by Brian Sletten
