This post is in reply to Hadi’s post. Please go ahead and read it. Done? Great, so let me try to respond, this time, from the point of view of someone who regularly asks for patches / pull requests.

Often management is late to figure out that a project is failing. Watching out for certain signs can help tell quickly when a project is heading for failure.

Here at Braintree, we are big fans of Puppet for system administration. In our ever-changing infrastructure, Puppet allows us to quickly provision and re-provision servers in multiple environments. We are also big fans of keeping our infrastructure lean and simple. Each piece of infrastructure that we must maintain comes with a cost. We have taken advantage of an under-appreciated feature of Puppet that allows us to manage our servers in a completely decentralized manner.

There is an obvious truth this statement points towards: It's a terrible idea to try to fix bad code with good documentation. There's another obvious truth: Good documentation can't improve the code, it can only explain it. If you remove the documentation, the code is still the code.

Most of us have a job, have a work to do. Some are studying . Sometimes we read or do some other stuff. The main problem of 21th century is our technology advantage. The thing, that was meant to simplify our life is making our life tougher. And that is the reality. Let me get to the point - we are getting distracted by lots of things - cellphones, IM ( Instant messaging ) and noise at the office. I am not the first one to admit it ( Find just same idea at "Rework" by 37 signals & GTD - Getting Things Done by David Allen ). There are lots of ways to fight the "distraction" but i'd love to speak about music .

This week we look at simple security rules for coders, the menace of DDoS attacks (and why the size of the attack doesn't matter) and mobile strategy.

I've given lots of presentations, and since I go to a lot of conferences I see a lot too. This means I see a lot of problems, where people are doing things that reduce the efficacy of their talks. I've not tried to come up with a comprehensive list, so the ones I'm raising here are just a few things off the top of my head. Like most smells, these aren't always wrong, but should always make you think.

Kevlin Henney examines code samples to see what can be learned from them starting from the premise that one won’t write great code unless he knows how to read it.

Have you ever wondered what to do when needing “just a small change” to a third-part library your project depended on? This post describes how to use Maven and Javassist to take a dependency of your project, instrument it to modify its behavior, re-pack it, and release it as an artifact with a different name (so that you me depend on my-customized-lib instead of on lib).