Posts

Writing software doesn’t require discipline, but writing good software does. I would argue that the vast majority of tech debt in projects results from PoCs/prototypes/spikes. The code from these typically aren’t intended to make it into production, but they almost invariably do in some capacity. “I won’t bother writing unit tests for this code, it’s purely exploratory.” The code grows… “It’s just a rough proof-of-concept.” …and grows… “It won’t make it to production!” ...

It seems like every software company you talk to will boast about how they use the latest development process du jour—Agile, Lean, XP, Kanban—pick your poison. What’s interesting is that the people evangelizing their chosen methodology are typically managers, not developers, almost emphasizing the process more than the product. Startups and other young tech companies seem to be particularly guilty of this (after all, every time someone utters the words “lean startup”, an angel investor gets his wings). ...

I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago who was putting together a business presentation for potential investors. He was developing a plan for a campground kiosk system that would rely on GIS data to allow guests to view and check in to camp sites. The plan was reasonable enough and mostly feasible. He carefully considered all the costs—licensing for a third-party GIS, kiosk hardware, line trenching—and then there was software. ...

I spent the better part of two days working on Bluetooth connectivity for an Android app I’m developing. Going into it, I had virtually no experience working with Bluetooth, especially on Android. I quickly discovered some of the peculiarities of the platform’s Bluetooth API. In addition to connecting to Bluetooth devices, the client wanted to pair and unpair from the app. The easy way out, and probably The Android Way™, would be to pass that responsibility off to the OS, à la an Intent: ...

One of the things that Spring 2.5 introduced back in 2007 was component scanning, a feature which removed the need for XML bean configuration and instead allowed developers to declare their beans using Java annotations. Rather than this: We can do this: It’s a pretty simple idea since Java makes it very easy to introspectively check a class’s annotations at runtime through its reflection API. Spring’s component scan feature also allows you to specify the base package(s) to scan for beans. ...