Programmers, designers, and sysadmins doing real good for humanity and the world in their spare time

In Simple Made Easy argues Rich Hickey that mixing orthogonal concerns introduces unnecessary complexity and that we should keep them separate. This mixing sometimes occurs on such a basic level that we believe that there is no other way to do it,

This section in the Painless TDD series looks at object dependencies; when you ask for more than you need, and why the "natural" choices may not always be the best ones.

Kirk Knoernschild is one of the leading experts when it comes to the OSGi community. DZone recently had a chance ot interview him about his thoughts on modularity in 2012 and his new book is "Java Application Architecture: Modularity Patterns with Examples Using OSGi." The book introduces 18 patterns that will help you design more modular software.

Are you looking for a solution to your unit tests modifying data? Perhaps your unit tests are so slow that none of your teammates bother running them? You need mock objects.

Where do you fit performance in the software development lifecycle? This innocent question carries the mind baggage of having to retrofit performance into an existing process.

Databases, tablespaces, and datafiles are closely related, but they have important differences: An Oracle database consists of one or more logical storage units called tablespaces, which collectively store all of the database's data.

In this webinar Dave West, Chief Product Officer at Tasktop, describes what Lean ALM looks like and introduces the 4 tenets of Autonomy, Transparency, Adaptability and Collaboration (ATAC) that unite to maximize flow.

Trac is an open source enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. As many open source project, Trac has a plugin architecture that allows to extend the core functionalities. Here is a list of Scrum and Agile oriented plugins available in the Trac ecosystem.

This blogpost is a first stab at providing a structure to codify devops practices. The wording, descriptions are pretty much work in progress, but I found them important enough to share to get your feedback.

At Bump Technologies, we recently completed a significant database migration from MongoDB to Riak. Almost all of our users' data -- the lists of people they've bumped, communications sent and received, handset information, social network OAuth tokens, etc. -- had been stored in MongoDB, but if you open the app today all of these interactions will be backed by Riak.

After my talk during ConFoo on Advanced Date/Time Handling I received a question about whether the UTC-offset, together with the date/time in years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds, was enough for storing a date/time in a database and still being able to do calculations with this. The answer to this question was no, but it lead to an even more interesting discussion about what would be enough to store an accurate date/time in a database.

The subject of build dependencies is neither a trivial nor a minor one. Various build tools approach this subject from different perspectives contributing various solutions, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

On the Importance of Naming in Software Systems, part III. Exploring the semantic nature of Software using linguistic concepts.

A few folks suggested to me that a bit more information on the built-in properties and property scoping for uDeploy would be handy. Message received, and we’ll flesh out the documentation on that front. In the meantime, here’s a quick list of the automaticly available properties.