Musings of a Software Development Manager

Banks don’t like being dependent on any one particular thing. They like to have a lot of options. Typically, we’ll roll out WebLogic, but we’ll also have JBoss on the side. Who uses Weblogic? IBM Websphere? Anybody use Websphere by choice? No hands at t’all, (Laughter from the audience) I like that one. So for [...]

Two days at the San Jose Tech Museum hearing about Ruby rejuvenated the old cranium. Just in time since I had spent the previous day doing about 14 hours of troubleshooting on some Enterprise software. The conference had somewhere above 100 attendees (I didn’t count). It was all in one big hall on the first [...]

Josh Susser gave a pointed talk on how you can contribute to Rails, or really any other open source project for that matter. Why Contribute? Maybe there’s the guilt associated with the freeloader effect that drives you to contribute. Guilt is never the strongest motivation though. Better motivations include getting some measure of control over [...]

Someone asked me if Twitter was TCP or UDP. UDP, it’s definately UDP. I can’t talk about the numbers, but UDP. – Blaine Cook Scaling Twitter talk at 2nd Annual Silicon Valley Ruby Conference Blaine talked about dealing with traffic on the busiest Rails based site. His comment was related to their use of DRB [...]

Alex Chafee and Brian Takita of Pivotal Labs mix regular rails tests including fixtures with Selenium tests for a full stack test in one. They kicked off the 2nd Annual Silicon Valley Ruby Conference in style with a focus on testing. Few thought it odd to be talking about testing early in the morning. Rails [...]

My clearest memory of how powerful transparency can be was in a discussion years ago with a Fortune 500 E-commerce VP. We’d successfully done a few million dollars of e-commerce work for them over the period of about a year and he was asking if we could develop about 15 sub-sites localized for places like [...]

Mock frameworks can generate an ‘aha’ moment if you introduce them at the right moment. The evolution looks like this: Introduce unit testing as a concept. Walk through the basics of an xUnit framework. Introduce test driven development. Introduce fake objects or hand rolled stubs to substitute for things like DAOs. Use specialized mock object [...]

James Ward from Adobe came out to give a presentation on Adobe Flex. Some of the demos were really impressive, especially the one with a simulated book that you could turn over and fold pages on. He covered Apollo as well. He’s touring around as a general evangelist. The SACJUG peppered him pretty well with [...]

I’m the wiki champion at work. It didn’t start out that way. We brought Confluence in house at the urging a motivated tech lead. The champion set up the wiki and ran training sessions for a while. Soon after they moved on to another position and I inherited the wiki champion belt: A passionate, enthusiastic [...]

I’m not sure anyone else will find this of much use, but the following is a list of tools, frameworks and libraries we use currently: Java Frameworks JSF 1.0 MyFaces AJAX Anywhere Spring Hibernate iBATIS JUnit EasyMock Log4J JODA Time Struts (Though just for one 3rd party app and some older applications) Tools RAD 6.0 [...]