If you ask a Ruby programmer why he is using Ruby, you will probably get several answers like: It is dynamic. I allows me too keep my code DRY. I get results faster. Aside from all these statements, there is one statement that almost always comes up. I use Ruby because it makes me happy! [...]

Do you remember the time before 9/11 when you could arrive to the airport 10 minutes before the plane’s departure and just walk on to the plane. Now, you have to arrive at least an hour before the plane departs and you have to strip to get through a security. The security is just for [...]

I recently was contacted to implement an ASP.NET MVC application and I saw this as a great opportunity to compare it with Rails3. What immediately strikes you when you start with ASP.NET MVC is how similar it is to Rails. No one can steal ideas like Microsoft! Rails ASP.NET MVC Purpose (if not obvious) /app/models [...]

I can’t take credit for this statement, since I am only drawing the logical conclusion from a statement said by a man far smarter than I. Donald Knuth wrote in his famous paper Structured Programming with go to Statements (PDF): We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: pre-mature optimization is [...]

Some of you may remember the article, by Bruce Tate, Don’t Make Me Eat the Elephant Again. It was an article about EJB, and Bruce was begging Sun not to make the same mistakes with EJB3 as they had done with EJB, and EJB2. They didn’t, Spring came along as better alternative and forced EJB3 [...]

I just read, or rather skimmed, the book, called Everyday Scripting with Ruby and it is awful. I had high expectations. I was expecting something like Perl for System Administration, where you right away get into hard core Perl scripting. This book is nothing like that! It is a really basic introduction to Ruby, and [...]

This morning I woke up singing, like I do most mornings. There are so many things ahead of me and most of them I like to do. One of those things is going to work. I worked at Jayway, for five years, three years ago, and I recently came back. The reason I left was [...]

When you clone a git repository, everything is automatically setup to allow you to fetch, pull, push to and from the remote repository, origin. But what is really going on? git remote is configured with a few lines of configuration in the config file inside the .git/ directory. Here’s how it works: Create a new [...]

Since I had plenty of time to read on my flights back and forth to OOPSLA, I managed to read through a few books. One of them was Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies by Tom DeMarco et al. Being the sceptic that I am, my attitude when starting to read this book was: “Yeah, I [...]

The analogy of software developers as craftsmen has become very popular. I don’t know where it started, but the first book I read about it was the excellent book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas. I really liked this analogy, it seemed right. A few years later, Pete McBreen released the book [...]

Moving Fast at Scale, Lessons Learned at Facebook, Robert Johnson Facebook has over 1 million active users per engineer. Slowing down to get it right is not a good idea, unless you know exactly that your idea is right. If you try things fast, you can try out more things and you can get feedback [...]

This post is cross-posted at my personal blog. Jeannette Wing, CMU, Frontiers in Research and Education in Computing Jeanette said that there has been a paradigm shift. Not just about computing’s metal tools (transistors and wires), but also our mental tools (abstraction and methods) Is this really a new paradigm shift? Maybe for the National [...]