Jeff Atwood likes referring to his blog post about Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive. where he writes: "Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always."

I’ve been working with the Drupal community on design projects for coming up to 12 months now - a splash in the ocean compared to many in the Drupal community but long enough to get a feel for how things work.

For a long time I've been looking for a web framework that would ease the development of web UI in portlets. Pure JSP is too old-fashioned and the abstraction it provides is just too low-level.

The risks of Big Design Up Front isn't the "Up Front" part, it's the "Big" part. Doing too much design without validating it inevitably drives a good bit of the productivity loss that continues to hamper software projects.

Something which constantly surprises me about Domain Driven Design is how there is a pattern described in the book for just about every possible situation you find yourself in when coding on projects.

Throughout my 20s and 30s, I played D&D and other fantasy role playing games at least once a week. Doing so did more than teach me the rules of combat or proper behavior in a dragon's lair. I gained several skills that truly did help me in my computing career.

This is the next installment in my series hoping to elucidate my own preferences for Fan after having been a fan of Scala. I realize that the same thing isn't for everyone. If Scala works for you, great, and feel free to comment and/or correct any of my mistakes. For today, I'm now moving on to global variables.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’m officially a member of the DZone team! It all started about a month ago when I was contacted by Rick Ross. To my surprise Rick had actually seen my blog and happened to read a post about me possibly seeking some freelance work. So he recommended that I got in contact with Matt to see if they had any coding work. Well I wasn’t quite qualified for the code work that needed to be done so I figured that my chances of working for DZone were gone. Luckily around that same time Rick contacted me again about a job within his department. He basically said that he liked how I was trying to get the DZone community more involved with my link posts and he then offered me a position for link moderation. We agreed that we would give it a month to see how things went. As you can assume it’s been a month since then and I’m now officially a member of the DZone team. (There is MORE to the story which you can read by clicking the link.)

To succeed as an IT manager, and to advance your career into the executive sphere, you need some very specific traits - 11 to be exact. From needs assessment to team building, these are the skills you need to be at the top of your game. read more..

Designer out there must have faced a problem that your design got rejected sometime. I want to discuss one of the reason. The reason is because we always got inspired by the globalization designs. What I mean by globalization design? What about localization design? Lets discuss it in more details...

I believe developers and technologies should blog basically it helps in creating their web presence and sharing their ideas and thoughts, it does not matter how big or small it is. There are numerous benefits if a developer starts blogging online as there are numerous platforms available which lets one write free blogs without spending a single penny...read more

I've been buried in a big project on campus for the last few months. Yesterday, we delivered our report to the president. Ah, time to breathe, heading into a holiday weekend! Of course, next week I'll get back to my regular work. Department stuff. Cleaning my desk. And thinking about teaching software engineering this fall. A bit of side reading found via my Twitter friends has me thinking about testing, and the role it will play in the course. In the old-style software engineering course, testing is a "stage" in the "process", which betrays a waterfall view of the world even when the instructor and textbook say that they encourage iterative development. But testing usually doesn't get much attention in such courses, maybe one chapter that describes the theory of testing and a few of the kinds of testing we need to do. It seems to me that testing can take a bigger place in the course, if only because it exemplifies the sort of empiricism that we should all engage in as software developers. When we test, we run experiments to gather evidence that our program works as specified. We should adopt a similar mindset about how we build our programs. How do we know that our design is a good one? Or that our team is functioning well? Or that we are investing enough time and energy in writing tests and refactoring our code?

Cloud Computing is getting a lot of attention these days. Everyone from CTOs to home users, are exploring to find what’s in it for them, before adopting it. An incessant thought that’s bouncing back and forth in my mind, from last few days is: Will cloud computing eventually slow down the Internet? or How much stress cloud computing will put upon Internet’s backbone? or Is Internet’s backbone strong enough to bear the stress, cloud computing will eventually put on it?

There's a question that comes up on Stack Overflow every couple of months: "How do I strip diacritic marks from Unicode characters?". Popular variants include "How do I remove special characters" and "How do I convert Unicode to ASCII", but the underlying motivation is the same: characters that don't have their own key on an American keyboard have no place in modern web software.

Clients always ask the dreaded, lip-biting question: “How much is this going to cost?” To which I always reply, “That’s a good question.” Whatever pie-in-the-sky number we blurt out, we live in fear that our estimate might be grossly incorrect. In order to properly address price concerns with clients, we must first adjust how we classify software development on the marketplace. It’s time to realize that while companies might sell their software to end-users as a product, the development of that product is a service and should be treated as such.

Lisp programmers have long used macros to extend their language. Indeed, their success has inspired macro notations for a variety of other languages, such as C and Java. There is, however, a paucity of effective pedagogic examples of macro use. This paper presents a short, non-trivial example that implements a construct not already found in mainstream languages. Furthermore, it motivates the need for tail-calls, as opposed to mere tail-recursion, and illustrates how support for tail-call optimization is crucial to support a natural style of macro-based language extension.

In many languages you have type constructors; given a type A and a type constructor Lift, you get a new type Lift>. A functor is a type constructor together with a function lift: (A -> B) -> (Lift> -> Lift>) that preserves composition and identities. If h is the composition of two other functions g and f h (a) = g (f (a)), then lift (h) is the composition of lift (g) and lift (f) lift (h) (la) = lift (g) (lift (f) (la)). Similarly, if h is the identity function on variables of type A h (a: A) = a, then lift (h) will be the identity on variables of type Lift> lift (h) (la : Lift>) = la.

The UK's emergency systems should be based on open source, to help ensure interoperability, the British IT news service ZDNet reports last week Tuesday quotes Ian Readhead, director of Information of ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers.

SOA, ESB’s, SOAP and a plethora of other alphabet-soups colluding to increase, not decrease complexity have plagued enterprises and enterprise software for years.

Here are some quotes about running Rails applications on GlassFish from user@jruby mailing list...

I'm a huge advocate of learning. And it's natural for devs to want to pick up new stuff. However, many devs don't realize that they may report to a manager that actually wants to prevent them from learning new things - even on their own personal time. I think this type of manager is rare.

I was fortunate enough to be featured in the July issue of Inc. magazine’s “The Way I Work” column. (Page 114, the one with Paul Graham on the cover.) The article is great and the photography very flattering, but it’s a little misleading. All TWIW articles are written in the first person, but not directly authored by the subjects, and we’re not allowed to see them before they’re published. These bizarre rules have some unexpected outcomes, and I’ve taken the liberty of rewriting the article in my own words and with lots of extra links.

New York Times techonology writer David Pogue, a writer I admire, recently listed some of his best productivity tips — and it’s a good list. One thing I noted with interest is that he uses his email inbox as a to-do list, which is a fairly common practice.

When finishing design school you will learn so many thing your teachers never told you. Here you have some of those things.

Connecting the Semantic Web and Cororate Master Data Management....