I attended a practitioner's report yesterday that described experiences in integrating a number of static analysis tools into eBay's development process. In essence, it was a short presentation of the paper, "Understanding the Value of Program Analysis Tools." The valuation methodology was simple: did the cost of the tools find enough defects to [...] Read More…
Kathy Sierra's keynote, Creating Passionate Users, was really great yesterday. She's an extremely talented speaker and has an intimate understanding of what it takes to get people interested and listening. More technology presentations should be so exciting. In addition, more technical tutorial books should be like Sierra's Head First series. Read More…
Although Peter Turchi's keynote, Once Upon a Time, Like Never Before, wasn't directly related to developing software, it was a reminder that creation shares many commonalities across disciplines. He has a lovely looking book, Maps of the Imagination, that offers a geographical metaphor to explain the creative process. He explained how seeking out [...] Read More…
I'm running a small, very informal (read: mostly unscientific) survey for a school project. The goal is to collect a bit of information about what artifacts you use to guide your implementations when writing code and how you discover those artifacts. If you're a software developer and I haven't already sent you an [...] Read More…
I monitored a tutorial yesterday titled, "Java Concurrency Utilities in Practice", which was really a compressed version of the fine book, Java Concurrency in Practice. Since I've only picked at bits and pieces of the book and haven't applied a lot of it, the tutorial was actually a good review for me. The [...] Read More…
After staying up unnecessarily late this past weekend, I had to be at the le palais des congrès bright and early at 7am on Sunday for an OOPSLA volunteer meeting. I was super exhausted and I found a spot to curl up in for a quick nap before I had to go work the [...] Read More…
I'm off to lovely Montréal again for OOPSLA. Despite my recent inability to keep this blog filled with ridiculously interesting content, I'll be posting regular updates about how the conference is going while I'm away. So, keep your eyes peeled! Read More…
The main bedroom in my house doesn't get a good signal from the wireless router in the living room and Nicholas and I have been trying to think of ways to remedy this for a little while. There are literally tens of wireless networks around our house so we're guessing it's due to [...] Read More…
I've rarely been in an environment that has allowed for so much free, creative thinking as I am now at grad school. It's wonderfully refreshing and it makes me feel like I'm a kid in a candy store, but it also poses some challenges in how to organize one's ideas in such a way [...] Read More…
I love the Nintendo Wii. Now I see that it's not only a fun party toy, it's also a classroom tool! Yesterday, in my computational biology class, the instructor hooked up a Wii remote to his MacBook Pro using the open source Darwiin Remote software to rotate a 3D model of a folded [...] Read More…