Aliens sending messages, Water flowing over a map and finding the hidden Welcome message in a String... Yes, Google Code Jam has returned for the 2009 edition! I participated in the Qualification Round and managed to solve all but 1 input set....
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Tags: Functional Programming, Google, google code jam, Scala
Filed under Functional Programming, General, Java, Scala | 4 Comments »
Over and over again, the documentation discussion flares up before, during and after projects. What documentation should we make? Why do we need design documents? How can we be sure the correct software is being build if we don't have a complete Functional Design Document. If the Functional design document isn't in line with the actual software being build, how can we check whether we got what we paid for? etc. etc. etc. (more...)
Tags: Agile, document, documentation
Filed under Agile, General | 2 Comments »
Feb 2007 - An endeavor to share our excitement, experience (rather inexperience) and child like curiosity about the new toy - Agile Software Development Methodology (more...)


Last week I attended JAX '09, the Java User Conference in Mainz, Germany.
Or rather "conferences", because once you're there JAX is indistinguishable from something called SOACON and the Eclipse Forum Europe, which officially take place in parallel. (more...)
Tags: Agile, conference, Eclipse Forum, JAX, SOACON
Filed under Agile, Eclipse, General, Java, OSGi | 4 Comments »
After the GIDS 2008 last year, me and one of my colleague at Xebia expressed our interest in attending Developer Summit this year. Great Indian Developer Summit(GIDS) took place from 23-25 April 2009 at Bangalore , India.
Our journey started with witnessing a huge chaos at the airport. Their systems had gone down so everything was haywire. We joked of representing Xebia here as well to present them a better software solution
@Bangalore , India
The first day saw a huge number of people. A lot of buzz and enthusiasm among the delegates. Big sponsors like Microsoft, Adobe , Red hat , JBoss , IBM , Yahoo , Sony Ericsson were associated with this event. Everyday there were five parallel tracks going on at five different halls.
In this blog I would briefly cover the highlights. (more...)
Tags: Java, Xebia
Filed under General | 1 Comment »
My colleague Age pointed me at a blog post by Uncle Bob about a presentation where a Mr. Josuttis presented the inevitability of crappy code because "businesses will do whatever it takes to cut costs and increase revenue, and therefore businesses will drive software quality inexorably downward". Uncle Bob proceeds to go against that argument, but I find it to be a technocratic (DSLs and produce better code) and ultimately unsatisfying answer. My answer to the problem?
Face reality, grow up.
Filed under Agile, General, Project Management, Scrum | 8 Comments »
Yesterday was a very good day! After speaking at QCon the day ended with CloudCamp. An evening dedicated to everything cloud with an amazing turnout! More then 500 folks joined.
Turns out that although in general people tend to agree what a cloud is, nobody actually knows exactly what to do with it! (more...)
Filed under Amazon Webservices, Architecture, General, Performance, Virtualization, qcon | No Comments »
This recipe describes the process of baking marvellous, slightly burned decisions. If you’re looking for the well-done version of decisions, I would suggest altering this recipe by adding things like “necessity”, “timing”, “context” and “feeling” or taking another recipe on the subject.
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Filed under General, Project Management | 2 Comments »
Narinder Kumar, Vivek Kumar Yadav and Vincent Partington talk about choosing a technology stack for building an automated deployment product, currently named Deploy it.
- What is a technology stack.
- Why do you need it.
- What did they choose and why.
- How Agile/SCRUM helped the team to make better choices.
- Lessons learned.
- What not to do when choosing a technology.
Hosted by Robert van Loghem.
So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!
Filed under Frameworks, General, Middleware, Podcast, Xebia Labs | 2 Comments »
Last year I came back from QCon San Francisco filled with new ideas. DSLs were clearly going to rule the world so I'd better start using them any chance I got. No surprise then that I was back for more this year, hoping to find out about the hottest new bleeding edge trends. Unfortunately the first two days were slightly disappointing. I did visit some interesting cloud computing introduction talks and Kent Beck's talks were pretty funny, but nothing really blew me away.
Luckily the last day was more like it. Here are some impressions of what's hot and what's not:
- Relational databases are very uncool (or "unkuu" as Kent Beck's son would apparently put it)
- Alternative storage solutions like CouchDb, AtomServer, and Neo4J are very hot.
- Google's BigTable and MapReduce are very influential and lots of innovative new projects are based on them.
- Everything should have a RESTful API.
There were a lot of interesting sessions on friday but the best two were definitely:
- Unshackle your Domain, a DDD session that talked about some very interesting domain modeling techniques. See Erik's blog for more info on that session.
- AtomServer - The Power of Publishing for Data Distribution. These guys not only discussed a very interesting RESTful data storage solution, they were also very entertaining and their new dating site http://www.AnyoneWillDo.com/ will undoubtedly be very successful.
All in all it was very much worth it coming to San Francisco this year and hopefully I'll be back for more inspiration next year.
Filed under Domain Driven Design, General, qcon | 4 Comments »