I’ve been talking about code smells for a while, but code is far from the only thing that can go wrong. What about process smells? There are things in your development process that may not necessarily be wrong in every situation, but are a signal that something could be wrong. Some of these are more definitely stinky than code smells, but not all of them. As always, if you’re happy.. Read More
“How do you approach a new codebase?”
Why yes I do love mining the internets for blog post ideas :) This particular question is about learning a new codebase at work, but I think there’s plenty of stuff here that would carryover to learning the codebase of an opensource project you want to contribute to. When you want to learn a new codebase, the very first thing you need to do is get it to build on.. Read More
Let’s poke at Tomcat!
A while ago I mentioned that every Java project has to have a main method somewhere. I started thinking it would be interesting to dig into a larger project and show how even a whole servlet container starts with a main method, just like the smallest hello world program. So let’s poke at Tomcat! Why tomcat? Because it’s open source, I’ve used it before, and honestly it was the first thing.. Read More
“Does working at a bad company damage one’s career?”
Another blog post inspired by a question on The Workplace, specifically: does working at a bad company damage one’s career? Yes, but not the way the questioner seems to think. The bad company in this case is very disorganized, which I’m sad to say isn’t exactly unheard of. That company does sound like an especially bad example, but if you get a few developers together you’ll hear plenty of very similar.. Read More