cwash into software

Update: A great article on OSGi popped up on Javalobby today. Check it out.

I haven’t yet written any thoughts about OSGi but it’s something that’s increasingly found its way on to my radar over the past year and a half or so. I’ve been doing a little bit of reading and research on it lately, (a quick introduction can be found via Adrian Colyer’s talks on InfoQ about it). Needless to say it’s got me excited. Really excited – to the point where I’m catching myself geeking out uncontrollably like Quagmire from Family Guy. What’s got me all giggity? (continue reading…)

Update: Sysinternals puts out some great developer friendly tools. They come in handy!
Update #2: I’ve made the switch to using Launchy over DOMercury.

Working on Windows XP is unavoidable at my job. While it’s not my favorite environment, I’ve found a decent baseline of software tools to augment the barebones OS that can get me to a place where it isn’t that bad. Note, I’m not including any tools for doing off-development related things, anything development related that is on the web or any cool plugins for any of these programs.

Here is what I need, in roughly the order I download them: (continue reading…)

Dwight D. Eisenhower said “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” After reading Jason Yip’s No matter how many times you say it, we still don’t need a QA on the team, I started thinking about how similar this is to the correlation between (software) quality and exploring what software quality is. In the spirit of Jason’s article, thinking about how you “get quality right” will have more positive results for the sake of quality than searching out defects. So the question stands, how do you get quality right? I’m not sure there’s a cut and dry answer, but I have a feeling it’s in the details. I know it sounds anecdotal, but quality isn’t easy. It requires a lot of effort applied constantly. It requires reward and incentive, not punishment and fear. It’s caring about small things, and shifting how your team thinks, communicates and works together. (continue reading…)

I can’t believe it’s already December! I came across 24ways last year and thought it was a neat concept: an ‘advent calendar for web geeks’ – take a look! They had a pretty good variety last year and I’m expecting some good things this year.