Peeling back the onion of stupidity

I’ve mentioned the book Adrenaline Junkiesin a previous post and I’m not seeing the value in a common language for discussing problems. Today’s pattern is the ‘Onion of Stupidity’. This is a common pattern where you build up hack upon workaround upon compromise, inject a little shortsightedness and wind up seeing a good chunk of your effort goes into cleaning it up. A colleague here promoted the term “technical debt” to describe issues were we these types of issues and help us prioritize them....

May 7, 2009 · 2 min · Aaron Held

Netbeans for HTML-CSS work?

Due to an unfortunate series of work related events I find myself writing php code. Not only php code, but wordpress php code. That however is the topic of a later post (as is plugins that edit core code using regex based searches) I did the work in textmate but decided to spin up my new Netbeans 6.5 in order to test the subversion functionality. Immediately I noticed that Netbeans picked up a tag mismatch and highlighted it nicely:...

December 10, 2008 · 1 min · Aaron Held

javaFX sneaks out the door

Sun released version 1 of javaFX today - http://www.javafx.com/ Its a competitor to Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, but based on the java developer created demos it just does not look complelling enough to matter. Adobe had been making some great progress in the Flash virtual machine and the number of advances in Flash10 really impress the coder in me. As a development manager I’m seeing Actionscript programmers reach an impressive level of maturity, with unit testing, automated builds and solid object design....

December 5, 2008 · 1 min · Aaron Held

Specialization is for Insects

The other night we had a security issue that came up at 3am. Our combined response toolkit included DNS changes, akamai CDN configuration, adserver updates, javascript, HTML, and lots of good old fashioned interpersonal communication and persuasion. In these days where I’m working with dedicated ‘Javascript’ engineers that don’t read Java and operations people focused on CDN configurations that don’t know the application innards the concept of specialization is a concern....

October 20, 2008 · 3 min · Aaron Held

SpringSource - proving once again Java doesn't get the web

I just read an article in a java trade mag entitled: SpringSource CEO: “The Future of Enterprise Java is Clear and Bright” The premise sounds positive. Basically they took OSGI, Spring and threw it on Tomcat as a web server. The idea of being able to deploy OSGI bundles with the bag of beans development style of Spring is really compelling. What this negative post is about is how they still don’t get the ‘web’....

May 1, 2008 · 2 min · Aaron Held