Recently I was co-lecturing a workshop about web application developement with CouchDB. The event took place in the scope of a Summer University, which explicitly claims to provide a setting for lecturers to improve and to try out experimental teaching concepts.
Apart from simply distributing the share of work and apart from parallelizing preparation as well as oral presentation, my impression is that lecturing in pairs has positive side effects similiar to pair programming: >> more…
As only few developers and few architects might know, the idea of design patterns – popular in computer sciences – originates from the playground of architecture and built environment. It was Christopher Alexander with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein who wrote “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction” in 1977. In this book they describe patterns extracted from the rich (european) architectural history and how to apply them to current problems. Each pattern consists of a description of the problem, a sketch of the prototypical situation, a solution and a reference to related problems. Exactly the same way as the Gang of Four adapted it for problems in computer science in their book “Design Patterns. Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” in 1994. Apart from the formal characteristics in both areas the idea of design patterns produces an answer to the same question: how to transfer previous experiences into productive sources of knowledge? >> more…
In general it’s a good thing, when your IDE is able to surprise you from time to time. However I was a little scared, when IntelliJ IDEA informed me that vertex(maxX, maxX, 0); was probably wrong. Of course I knew that I was gonna replace the second maxX with maxY as soon as I would give up symmetry and calculate the second dimension, but IDEA – how could it know? It’s easy – the vertex methods parameter names are (x, y, z) – that’s why IDEA infered that “max” was probably a prefix. Clever. By the way this confirms the need to choose meaningful and consistent names, even though your IDE is the only one who will ever read and comment on your code 
Me and its godparents from conject proudly introduce the little sibling of our first baby. Parents always love to show around the achievements of their little geniuses and make big plans for their future – so do we. Wassily (named after his famous Bauhaus role model) is really good with colors. For now his drawings decorate my fridge only and conjects Munic office, but thats where all artists start their carrier, right? Soon after he has learned some basic rules of composition, we will start preparing the portfolio for his college of art application. Some time you’ll wish you had snatched some of his early work.
If you are a real developer you most likely have already been in a situation, where a group was welcomed with the phrase hey guys – on IRC, mailing lists or even in personal talk. Some of you might share the experience to not feel being addressed by this salutation. This situations leave me personally a little angry, because I don’t like to be ignored. As I am a calm and non-aggressive person my usual reaction is to just ignore the speaker as well and to behave as if the salutation didn’t take place (as if nobody talked to me). Unfortunately this way most people won’t notice they did something wrong, because they really aren’t aware of the exclusive nature of their language. >> more…
This question was raised and discussed at stackoverflow recently. Having used Grails for the sixbee project I shared our experiences compared to standard J2EE application development, especially to the subquestion:
Does it really confer rapid development benefits?
Definitely, it does. Even if the scaffolding path is left early and conventions are overriden to the own needs, the start-up period is very short, as we don’t have to care for many different technologies. That kind of lightweightness makes us work not only faster, but also more precise and clean. >> more…
Do you love to be surrounded by as much and good as possible technical equipment or do you prefer to sit in a group of at least three peers discussing a detail no matter how small the screen is? And what do you like about your favourite setting? In our team both work modes coexist peacefully completing each other and also the happy medium (2:2) can be observed sometimes – and of course also the small screens are of high quality.
Did you ever want to use builders in your grails taglib and wondered why the approach mentioned in the grails documentation doesn’t work at all? Here is what I found out after a lot of trial and error and digging in the MarkupBuilder, BuilderSupport and GroovyPagTagBody sources. Let’s stick with the example from the documentation and correct it until it works (the impatient can scroll down):
About a month ago we relaunched this blog with fresh colors and a crispy new layout. On the left you can see a reminder to the old green and grey theme as it was before. Its seriousness and tediousness didn’t seem to perfectly match our attitude (allthough we are of course serious after all). Some evenings of moving around pixels and poking around in php templates (enough is enough now) finally produced this colorful spring theme.
Enjoy!
Today is the 2nd Ada-Lovelace-Day, an “international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science”. This initiative originating in the UK encourages people to write about tech women whom they admire, who impressed them and who are heroines to them. I also pledged myself to write something, because womens achievements are often overlooked, disregarded or even disrated and therefor its a duty to me to spread the word.
There are plenty of stories to tell, so it was not easy to choose which one to write about. There are for instance the girls I work with, who are inspiring, amusing and fun to work with every day. They earn my respect, but instead of glorifying my colleagues (you can meet them in this blog btw) I want to take my hat off to three of the great ladies out there, each one totally different from the other. >> more…
