The Development Abstraction Layer – Joel on Software

Management’s primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that’s what programmers do. And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it’s unrealistic. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

You really have to read the whole article that Joel wrote. It’s scary how many times you can recognize companies (and people) that you’ve worked for/with in the past.

A friend of mine decided to rant about certifications…

Java Architect – king of the stunningly obvious: Insecure Geeks… is it still really all about the size of your hard drive?

I felt the same sense of frustration answering these BlackBelt questions as I felt back then. In short, the questions were not testing my depth of knowledge, but instead focused on clever tricks to try and fool me into picking the wrong answers

I know exactly what you mean (well, not about the waitress… does your wife know?)

Anyway, a few years ago, I wasted a weekend studying a certification book, and then wrote the official Sun Java™ Programmer certification exam. The end result… the waste of a weekend.

Oh, I passed the exam, but it was one of those “filled with clever tricks” things that convinced me such certificates are not worth the paper they are printed on. I could have spent that weekend doing something useful, like … contributing to an open source project, or … learning a new programming language. Instead, I have a certification that only convinces me that I need to look at others who have that certification very carefully… because if they actually think it is worth something, then I probably don’t want to hire them.

This may not seem like big news, but for the thousands of FreeBSD users, it’s huge.

FreeBSD Foundation Java Downloads

The FreeBSD Foundation has a license with Sun Microsystems to distribute FreeBSD binaries for the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and Java Development Kit (JDK). These implementations have been made possible through the hard work of the FreeBSD Java team as well as through donations to the FreeBSD Foundation that supported hardware, developer costs, and legal fees.

Rubernate Overview

Rubernate is an object-oriented storage for Ruby objects based on relational database.

For all you Hibernate addicts…

Continuous Integration Server Feature Matrix – DamageControl – Confluence

Stumbled across this great comparison of continuous integration tools. If it stays up-to-date, this will be a great way of figuring out which tool works best for your next project.

Grails – Home

Grails aims to bring the “coding by convention” paradigm to Groovy. It’s an open-source web application framework that leverages the Groovy language and complements Java Web development. You can use Grails as a standalone development environment that hides all configuration details or integrate your Java business logic

It will be interesting to see where this project goes. My gut feel, without having looked deeply into either project, leads me to believe that Grails (based on a scripting language) stands a better chance of succeeding than Trails. I’d love to see someone compare the two projects.

java.net: Testing Java in an Object-Oriented Way

This article introduces a list of object-oriented testing methodologies to test your Java programs, implementing a few important design patterns, using the JUnit testing framework.

This article on testing is a little thin on concrete examples, but conceptually I can’t argue with it. Introducing testing on an architectural level is a brilliant idea.

Basic test driven development makes it very obvious when we’ve gone off the rails… if it is hard to test, then there is usually something wrong with my implementation or design. I expect that introducing the same concepts at the architectural level will have a similar effect.

Team System development server released to manufacturing

LaPlante said that Microsoft is committed to developing a rich “partner ecosystem.” That may mean some strange bedfellows. LaPlante’s presentation included a demonstration of Teamprise 1.0, which supports a Linux-based interface into the VSTS environment. LaPlante said, “In 18 years of doing this, I have never done a Linux demo on stage.

The last time I heard a name that bad was Borland’s ill-fated attempt to change the corporate name to Inprise. We all know how well that worked.