Keynote at 4developers: The Game Of Life – Java‘s Siblings and Heirs are populating the Ecosystem

I was invited to give a keynote talk at the 4developers conference in Poznan, Poland.

Topic

I’d liked to talk about the Java.next programming languages on the JVM and polyglot programming. When pondering how to address this issue, two things came into my mind.
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Switching to Wordpress

After running this blog for some years on Serendipity, I finally switched to wordpress. All my other blogs are running on wordpress, so this was the only black sheep.
I use the Aspire theme for many of my other blogs but for this one a work/desk like theme seemed more appropriate. So I took a quick [...]

97TESPK: Scoping Methods

Now that 97 things every programmer should know lies on my compass table, I’ll post my contributions here that didn’t make it into the book.
The first is “scoping methods” which I thought about while reading Uncle Bob Martin’s Clean Code. He discussed scoping variables but only about putting methods near to each other. Obviously there [...]

12 patterns of development

Martin Fowlers Pattern talk at #jaoo made me make this 12 patterns of development song.
Have fun
Michael
On the twelfth day of Development,
my true dev sent to me
Twelve bridges bridging,
Eleven factories making,
Ten observers observing,
Nine builders building,
Eight visitors a-visiting,
Seven composites composing,
Six iterarators iterating,
Five golden states,
Four calling proxies,
Three nice adaptors,
Two commands commanding,
And a singleton in a pair tree!

On Unicode in DSLs

Guy Steeles Talk on Fortress reminded me on the possibility of using Unicode characters in strings and identifiers in most current programming languages.
That also opens the way for using them in DSLs. Either in internal or external ones. If the special symbols have already a defined meaning in the domain (perhaps as part of a [...]

On Signing MacBooks

Today was the last day of this great JAOO Conference. Rickard, Emil and Irene had to leave. I’ll stay for two more days. Tomorrow some tutorials and squill hacking with Jevgeni .
I had some really great discussions over the last couple of days. The conference atmosphere is the best place to breed new ideas.
As a [...]

On Coloring Lego – Print your own

I thought about extending Lego Time Tracking to a kind of Agile story and task management. There you take the time estimated for the task and put that many bricks of the color assigned to the task away to a central location where it is clearly visible (area of stacked bricks). Everyone contributing to the [...]

On Boosting My IDE(A) – Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA is fast again

Performance Problems
After struggling for some time with the performance problems with recent IDEA versions on my clients workstations, I’ve finally found a solution. After upgrading from version five the performance of IDEA began to degrade.
I had many hangs and a general sluggish feel.

On Finding The Anykey

Finally I’ve found it: The mysterious “Anykey” is living under the strange name of “QuickFix” in your IDE of choice.

Pressing Alt+Enter (Cmd+Enter) in Intellij IDEA or Ctrl+1 in Eclipse enables you to program on a “per example” basis. You can do
introduction of variables, fields, classes,
renaming
changing method signatures
completing structure
surrounding code with live template
importing dependencies
and much [...]

On LEGO Powered Time-Tracking; My Daily Column

I’ve had troubles with time tracking my worktime for all the years. I always found this to be a tedious burden and inconvenience. So one morning in my blue hour (reading in a cafe before work) I spent the time pondering the alternatives.
I started listing software and realworld solutions to timetracking that are possible and [...]