Little Tutorials

The “tech lead” role can be treacherous at times. While the name implies “leadership“, most of the times it doesn’t come with implied authority like a manager role for example. It often happens that this role is in a no-man’s-land where it brings a lot of responsibility but not enough formal authority. In order to successfully help a project from this position one has to navigate through narrow and convoluted straits.
The role is not clearly defined in most companies and it is placed in a continuum (more…)

I woke up this morning and I was Agile. We are all Agile now. Or we are gonna become Agile. Soon. No doubt about it. It is an order. And orders are not to be discussed, just executed.

The Enterprise goes Agile! With the elegance of the huge battleship being pulled across a desert between oceans by slaves, camels and elephants, the Enterprise goes Agile. You can hear the songs and you can feel the hot air vibrating from thousand chests: (more…)

Every once in a while I interview a new computer science graduate for a developer position. I prefer to ask the kind of questions that will let me see how they think about programming, if they think for themselves and if they are passionate about it.
Usually when I get to object oriented programming and I ask for characteristics of an OOP language, I get the text book mantra: encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism – good. And then I ask what is the purpose of each of them. (more…)

Behind any programming language there is a creator or sometimes a small team. Each language has a story and a philosophy and each creator had a motivation, a problem to solve.

Programming languages influence and sometimes determine the way programmers solve problems and the way problems can be solved. They gain supporters, make enemies and cause flames and “religious” wars. (more…)

This tutorial shows how you can script a Scala application using the Java 6 scripting engines features (JSR 223 Scripting APIs). It also proves the level of power Scala gets from running on the JVM and from being able to use Java APIs. Along with a syntax that tries hard not to alienate Java and C# programmers this power gives Scala a jump start in the race for wining a place in programmers’ minds. (more…)

Lately I seem to find everywhere lots of articles about the imminent dismissal of Java and its replacement with the scripting language of the day or sometimes with other compiled languages.
No, that is not gonna happen. Java is gonna die eventually of old age many many years from now.
I will share the reasoning behind my statement. Let’s first look at some metrics. (more…)

Designing the error path in the code is not the most entertaining part of a programmer’s job. We are focused on coding the solution, the success path, and the damn exceptions stand in the way demanding to be handled. What makes it even harder and murkier is the lack of well established rules for what constitutes an exception and how to decide what kind of exception each one is: checked vs unchecked. (more…)