I have an amazing time machine that lets me think better about projects. This is part 1 in a series of blog posts exploring the use of a time machine. Let’s say that you have a project that has been running for a couple of months. Looking back at your issue tracker and other artifacts, you notice th...

Jeg sitter i styret i Dataforeningen Østlandet hvor jeg er med å arrangerer Software 2015. Software er en kryssfaglig IT-konferanse hvor vi samler spesialister innenfor forskjellige fagfelt for å få dem til å snakke sammen på tvers av fagområdene. På konferansen er det dagsaktuelle temaer og trender...

Do you ever miss a command line to a web application? If you’re lucky, you may use a REST API with appropriate tools for the same job. This Christmas, I bought a Sonos system for our family. It’s a wireless speaker system that uses music streaming services. It supports both Spotify and Deezer, but w...

JavaScript Promises provide a strong programming model for the future of JavaScript development. So here I’m playing with promises. First I need a bit of a package.json file: { "name": "promises", "scripts": { "test": "node node\_modules/mocha/bin/mocha" }, "devDependencies": { "chai": "^1.10.0", "m...

The first commandment that any young programmer learns is “Thou Shall Not Duplicate”. Thus instructed, whenever we see something that looks like it may be repeated code, we refactor. We create libraries and frameworks. But removing duplication doesn’t come for free. If I refactor some code so that i...

Whole frameworks have been written with the purpose of handling the configuration of your application. I prefer a simpler way. If by configuration we mean “everything that is likely to vary between deploys”, it follows that we should try and keep configuration simple. In Java, the simplest option is...

This summer has been the most significant in my life. While I don’t often write about personal matters in this blog, I will make an exception. On July 12th my son Leon was born. Healthy, happy and obviously, from the perspective a father, perfect. Going through this fundamental life change has made ...

Pop quiz: What will be the output of this little program? public class DateFun { public static void main(String[] args) { long hours = getHoursOfDay(LocalDate.now(), ZoneId.systemDefault()); System.out.println(hours); } private static long getHoursOfDay(LocalDate date, ZoneId zoneId) { ZonedDateTime...

This article is dedicated to the ExileOffice team - revolutionizing the way we run our business in Exilesoft. As applications move more and more of their business logic to the client side, it falls upon us to simplify what’s left on the server to avoid distractions. My previous article shows how I g...

I once visited a team that had fifteen layers in their code. That is: If you wanted to display some data in the database in a web page, that data passed through 15 classes in the application. What did these layers do? Oh, nothing much. They just copied data from one object to the next. Or sometimes ...

Working with web applications in NodeJS is great. Using the same language and libraries on the client and server simplified the thinking. And NodeJS has fast tests and restart for a super quick edit-verify cycle when you’re coding. I like to write tests to verify the server-side and client-side logi...

One of my favorite ways to develop software is to do it together with others. Pair programming has always been a motivating and fun activity for me, but some pairings work better than others. When our team was formed we decided to pair program and rotate partners every day. I had lots of fun program...

If need the same functionality in two projects, you should reuse code between them, right? Or should you? For as long as there has been a profession of software engineering, we have tried to achieve more reuse. But reuse has both a benefit and a cost. Too often, the cost is forgotten. In this articl...

I’ve started using an approach for software project estimation that so far is proving to be fairly transparent, quick and reliable. I’ve observed that within a reasonable degree of variation, most teams seems to complete about one “user-relevant task” per developer per calendar week. There are so ma...

This blog post is dedicated to my colleague Seminda who has been experimenting with how to create simple and powerful web applications. Thank you for showing me your ideas and discussing improvements with me, Seminda. I find many C# applications have much unnecessary code. This is especially true as...

In his article Horizontal Reuse: An Alternative to Inheritance Toby Inkster compares how to implement multiple inheritance or mixins in Java, Perl, PHP and Ruby. It’s a very interesting comparison of programming languages features and well worth the read. Toby writes: In class-based object-oriented ...

Less Overproduction (of unused functions in interface between team members) Less Waiting (for the only person who knows a particular area) Less Motion (as everyone gets more skilled) Fewer Defects (because two pair of eyes see better than one) Less Over-processing (from duplicate responsibility) Les...

My post on DZone about Humble Architects sparked somewhat of a controversy, especially around my disparaging comments regarding Spring and Dependency Injection Frameworks. In this post, I expand on why I stopped using Spring. I was one of the earliest adopter of Spring in Norway. We developed a larg...

I’ve previously talked about the idea of shifting from estimates to budgets. The fundamental point of this article is that it’s more useful to control costs than to predict costs. The problem of this argument is whether it’s possible to develop software in that way. How will the relationship between...

Lean thinking describes seven classical sources of waste 無駄: Overproduction: Making stuff that nobody buys Over-processing: Creating stuff that is more fancy than what the customer wants Transport: Moving stuff from one place to another in order to create it or give it to a customer Motion: Expe...

Humility is not a very common trait with software architects. After having worked with a few awful architects and recently with a very pleasant one, I’ve compiled a few of my experiences in the way every architect loves: As a set of rules. Rule 0: Don’t assume stupidity It seems like some architects...

XML libraries in Java is a minefield. The amount of code required to manipulate and read XML is staggering, the risk of getting class path problems with different libraries is substantial and the handling of namespaces opens for a lot of confusion and errors. The worst thing is that the situation do...

“Show frequently what you’ve done to someone who cares” Are you working in the way you are because it’s a good idea, or just because someone told you to do it? I increasingly hear experienced professionals at Agile conference bemoan the blind adherence to the techniques of Scrum without understandin...

I recently read The Git Book. As I went through the Git Internals parts, it struck me how simple and elegant the structure of Git really is. I decided that I just had to create my own little library to work with Git repositories (as you do). I call the result Silly Jgit. In this article, I will be w...

My colleague and resident Git evangelist Guhan has written a very useful blogpost that gives a Step-by-step guide on how to set up Git clients for Windows. If you’re just now joining a Git project, this is exactly what you want. Read the article on his blog

How to make your code more concise and well-behaved at the same time Have you ever had an application that just behaved plain weird? You know, you click a button and nothing happens. Or the screen all the sudden turns blank. Or the application get into a “strange state” and you have to restart it fo...

In order to smoke test web applications, I like to run-to-end smoke tests that start the web server and drives a web browser to interact with the application. Here is how this may look: public class BookingWebTest { private DataSource dataSource; private Server server; @Before public void createServ...

“Problemet med Java er at det krever så mange abstraksjoner. Factories, proxies, rammeverk…” Min samtalepartner gjenfortalte inntrykket han hadde av de Java-programmerende kollegene sine. Jeg måtte innrømme at jeg kjente meg igjen. Kulturen rundt Java-programmering har noen sykdomstrekk. Kanskje det...

Many sources of stress on projects come from forgetting what our roles are. Scrum championed a simple set of roles with the development team, the Scrum Master, and the Product Owner. The first problem is the people affected by agile projects who fall into any of these categories, many of which are i...

In HTML applications, jQuery has changed the way people thing about view rendering. Instead of an input or a text field in the view pulling data into it, the jQuery code pushes data into the view. How could this look in a server side situation like Java? In this code example, I read an HTML template...