Do you want to know what is the best investment you can make with your time and money? Knowledge As a software developer you should be constantly acquiring new skills. This is the best way to advance your career and enjoy the rewards (monetary, emotional etc.). Towards that direction you should be reading books, devouring technical articles and staying informed ...

I had the pleasure of attending JavaOne this year, and I can sum up the experience in one word:  Brilliant.  This year was much different than in years past for me, as I had one talk to co-present on Sunday and I had the rest of the week wide open for attending sessions.  As such, I’ve learned that it really ...

One of the questions I hear all the time with people transitioning to using agile is this: How do we organize the project if we don’t have a project manager? If you read Manage It!, you know I don’t buy the idea of a controlling project manager. But a facilitative project manager? Oh my. That is a horse of a ...

Learning Elixir has a way of challenging everything you know about programming. Redis is becoming an assumed part of many web stacks, in the same breath as your database. But with Elixir, do you need it? Do you even need a database? The Changing World of Web Application Operation Here’s the standard mode of operation for a web application these ...

In my previous post “Kill the Deadlines” I rant about how (fake) deadlines are demotivating, reduce quality and burn development teams. But if you think about why people use deadlines, is to deliver a software project in a timely manner. While I’m not a proponent of using fake deadlines as a way to push developers, in a product development process ...

I was on the phone yesterday with a senior level hiring manager from a potential new client, and she said something I hadn’t heard in a long while. “We love older programmers.“ When I speak with CTOs and hiring authorities about their dream hires, some are more cautious than others when stating their preferences. I’m not a lawyer and don’t know ...

In the previous post we set up a spring security configuration by providing custom queries for user and authority retrieval from an sql database. Nowadays many modern applications utilize NoSQL databases. Spring security does not come with an out of the box solution for NoSQL databases. In those case we need to provide a solution by Implementing a Custom UserDetailsService. ...

Bugzilla has served the Eclipse Community well for many years, easily scaling to serve the needs of over 500 open source projects, servicing a community of thousands of software developers generating half of a million issue reports over close to two decades (I’m taking some liberties with that last one: it’s been about 17 years). When I say “easily”, I mean that ...

When an application developer or architect tasked with exploring the possibilities that containerized applications offer, nothing is easier than the Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK). The Red Hat CDK has all the Cloud tooling you need for your local OSX, Linux or Windows environment and it has a few containers pre-configured for you to explore. Last week this project ...

“The decline of Stackoverflow” is now trending on reddit, and I started this post as a comment in the thread, but it got too long. I’m in the 0.01% (which means rank #34) but I haven’t contributed almost anything in the past 4 years. Why I stopped is maybe part of the explanation why “the decline of stackoverflow” isn’t actually ...

This tutorial describes how to implement IoT push notifications. Using IoT push notifications, we can send notifications to other devices. In this case, we want to send an IoT push notifications from a smart object (like Arduino MKR1000) to a mobile smartphone (i.e. Android smartphone). This project integrates different eco-systems: IoT and Android. This project can have several implementations: for example, ...