I’m a big fan of Joel Spolsky’s writing, but I take issue with his latest posting. Universities shouldn’t be focused on teaching students the technologies and practices of the day. Anything you can learn by leafing through Getting Things Done,…
I ran across a nice blog entry discussing the different use case assumptions made by Perforce vs ClearCase regarding when developers will branch and merge. After using Perforce for the last two years and reading Laura Wingerd’s excellent book Practical…
Recently I wrote some database code and tried to convince myself that it was threadsafe. I realized I’d made a basic mistake about the serializable isolation level, and thought it was worth a quick blog entry to post the explanation,…
Am I the only one who feels a bit dirty after writing code that uses reflection? Most programmers agree that strong typing is a good feature in programming languages, because it allows compilers to catch many kinds of programming errors…
When developing applications using Eclipse or a similar IDE, you quickly get used to being able to test your software immediately after making a change. Plugins like MyEclipseIDE enable that kind of instant edit/compile/test cycle for web applications as well.…
My new favorite web hosting provider is A Small Orange. Their pricing is competitive, and their tech support is unbelievably quick and clueful.
Good article on Java5 Generics by Martin Wolf: It seems many programmers are confused about generics, in particular the use of the ? extends … notation. The question mark is called a type wildcard, and is typically used as…
This post continues my ongoing theme: That networks are great as long as software doesn’t pretend they are perfect. (I can’t take credit for the title – it’s been floating around for a long time.) Increasingly, software is being designed…
When you start a project to build a custom application for an enterprise customer, there are always universal requirements the customer doesn’t tell you about. These are things you have to do in order to implement the stated requirements, so…
Welcome to Joe on Computing, the new home for my blog. Although it will have many omissions and contain much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate – it has the advantage of matching the garish color scheme on…