This week I attended Berlin Buzzwords Conference 2010, a two-day event aimed at software developers. The conference offered two tracks, one on search and the other one on NoSQL systems. Typical attendees seemed to be MacBook-wielding, twittering lifestyle geeks, often with SQL-induced childhood issues. The hype level was high - a …

You can use RSS to easily follow a few high-profile websites and link sharing services like Slashdot or Digg to discover popular web content. But that's like reading a classic newspaper and some magazines: The information provided may have a higher chance of being relevant to you, but there's still …

Recently, I had the opportunity to work with Subversion 1.5 on a medium sized project. Since there were more than 20 developers working on the project with some of them in a different country, there was no other way than to use feature branches extensively. We thought Subversion's merge …

One of my pet peeves in programming is that few people use guard clauses. A guard clause is an almost trivial concept that greatly improves readability. Inside a method, handle your special cases right away and return immediately.

Have a look at the following example:

private int doSomething() {
    if (everythingIsGood …

In my projects, I've always been the one who took care of infrastructure, standardization and quality assurance from the development perspective. The funny thing is that I'm no admin and no QA guy, so most of it wasn't even my job. In this article, I'm going to list a few …

Most people eventually get it that building release artifacts using their IDEs is not the way to nirvana. Builds have to stay stable and reproducible between IDE revisions, and being able to execute them in a command line environment or especially continuous integration servers is key to agile development.

Fortunately …

Creating a good user interface is no trivial task, no matter if it's running as a desktop application or inside a browser. When it comes to accessing server-side resources (a common thing in the corporate world) web applications seem to be the first choice nowadays. You have complete control over …

Agile software development methodologies like Extreme Programming (XP) propagate collective code ownership: Every developer is allowed (and encouraged) to make changes wherever necessary. But is this really a realistic, useful approach?

The theory sounds compelling: Everybody knows their way around the code base and can work on anything. Without module …

As a programmer you should learn a new programming language once in a while to keep yourself flexible and open to new ideas. After lots of Java coding at work, it was time for me to take a step back and try something new. There were quite a few languages …

This weekend I finally had the time to take a look at GridGain, a computational grid package written in and for Java. GridGain is a an open source product licensed under LGPL-2.1 (the same as JBoss) with minor portions under the Apache 2.0 license, so use in commercial …