Stephans Blog

Catchy title? I mean it. After 25 years of programming, the only thing that really matters in software development is if a company understands the project triangle. That from the three variables scope, time and resources you can only define two. There are two kinds of companies. Those that understand this and those that don’t. […]

Well, how do you?
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Beware of the class loader. I recently had a major testing problem with some code because I didn’t take the (sometimes ugly) Java class loading mechanism into account. There was a small class where I wanted to unit test the calculateAge method.

class AgeCalculator {
public int calculateAge(Person person) {
[…]

The IconFinder website is pure genius. Highly appreciated. With icon finder you can search with keywords through free (CC and LGPL) icon libraries. I often find myself searching through the clear or famfamfam icons which are in different directories or on different computers. I hope IconFinder will grow to other collections. I’ll stay tuned..
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Catchy title. But the guys from ALTERthought have some - much needed - numbers. Their numbers show Grails to be more productive than Rails, which is in turn more productive than Spring and pure JEE. As I’ve argued for years, there is no science in computer science. We need to put facts back into computer […]

Update to my black swan post. I found an excellent quote in a risk book about hedge funds, A demon of our own design (as always no partner link) which reflects my black swan post. Richard Bookstaber writes about risk management for financial instruments: “The types of risk that could be readily measured were better […]

The biggest problem with tales about software success is that they only show the survivors. This problem is independent of the domain, be it Rails, Scrum or CMMI success stories. Survivor bias is when you only look at the survivors of a process and then attribute the success of the survivors to some attributes like […]

There is a lot of discussion about concise code. Comparing Java to Ruby, obviously Ruby has more concise code (This article contains code examples, which could be written better and which experienced Java and Ruby developers would write in differently. But the examples were chosen to illustrate points).
Compare this Ruby code taken from the Pragmatic […]

I thought about open source and had lots of discussion in the past few years about open source in general, business models, different and superiour licenses, pragmatic open source and stuff. As I’ve been also developing open source software for the last twenty years, I’m interested in the state of the open source developers.
Some […]

I have to do some cleaning of my open source projects (cintoo, Gabriel, Radeox). For there are other rights holders and trademark owners, for some there are old repositories I have no access to. With me leaving my last employer some things have changed and now I have to clean up the mess ;-) Sorry […]