Community Server

The guys at Codehaus are moving the continuous integration servers. I must say that I had a WTF-moment when this build failure notification dropped in my inbox: I find it amusing that the build failed because “all the tests passed”. The real reason was that it was unable to find Maven on the build server…

Last week I wrote a short anecdote about getting big, upfront design wrong. The next chapter is on quick and dirty fixes. You know, those hacks we do to “make something work”. These often come about after frenetic debugging session, where we debug a system into existence. Smacking a piece of drywall on top of the existing drywall is a ...

Last November my family and I move into a brand new apartment. Since we’ve moved in, we’ve had builders coming in to fix things over and over again. Today they started to “refactor” the wiring in our kitchen. Maybe I should get this picture framed as a reminder of not to trust Big Design Upfront (which is the way they build ...

After giving my talk on language oriented development with .NET for the Oslo chapter of the Norwegian .NET User Group I was approached by one of the attendants who pointed out that I had excellent taste in notebooks. Most people though he was referring to my shiny MacBook Pro, but he had this slide in mind… The notebook is an Moleskine ...

Whatever language you write in, your task as a programmer is to do the best you can with the tools at hand. A good programmer can overcome a poor language or a clumsy operating system, but even a great programming environment will not rescue a bad programmer. Kernighan and Pike When I attended Richard Öberg’s talk on Qi4J at the Oslo ...

Scott asks us to show our spaces - here are mine:

A little over a month ago I made the big switch from Windows to Mac OS. In that post I wrote that apart from me having a hard time getting used to new keyboard shortcuts, life on the Mac felt good. So how does it feel a good month down the road, and what applications did I end up using? (A big “thank you” is due to everyone who gave me ...

Develop with Pleasure is the slogan of my favorite IDE vendor, and today took it to the extreme. Below is a picture of me writing code while sitting on a pier with the sun shining from clear blue sky. If it hadn't been for my Mac's super bright LED lit screen I wouldn't have seen a damn thing, but today it was so bright that I had to wear shades. ...

After suffering from serious mac-envy for some time, I decided it was time to switch from Windows to a real Mac. Yesterday my brand new Apple MacBook Pro arrived and I've been spending the last few hours moving and installing stuff. Just like Scott, I'm trying to switch to native Mac apps rather than running the good old Windows apps in Parallels ...

Regular readers might recall that I recently got a new job as an enterprise architect. I must admit that I don't write as much code as I used to, but I rest assured I still get my hands dirty. I've actually come across a rather effective way of telling whether I've strayed too far away from my beloved development tools. As long as I keep hitting ...