akeefer

11 ms·

31.
by akeefer 15y ago
In general I like the way Go interfaces work (we'd like to do something similar in Gosu as well); they let you decouple different parts of a system much better than you can if you have to explicitly declare interfaces. When discussing putti
32.
by akeefer 15y ago
The DCEVM is a patched version of JDK 7 that allows the code reloading mechanism in the JVM to swap nearly arbitrary changes. I'd highly recommend it if you're trying to do any dynamic reloading of Java code during development. http://ja
33.
by akeefer 15y ago
This pretty much exactly describes the experiences that our various teams have had. We've tried all manner of software tools over the years (Jira, since we use that for bug tracking already, Jira + Greenhopper, Agile Zen, Pivotal Tracker)
34.
by akeefer 15y ago
Having spent the last 9 1/2 years working on systems for property and casualty insurers, I have to say that I don't really agree with everything. I generally agree with the point about designing your architecture to accommodate whatever get
35.
by akeefer 15y ago
Pretty much all "enterprise software" is fundamentally the art of taking totally irrational, human-defined, fuzzy, incompletely-specified pre-existing processes that have been built up over decades or centuries, and turning them into an aut
36.
by akeefer 15y ago
Sorry for the late reply (didn't see the question until now). The DCEVM is just a patched version of the JVM dll/so file that allows the normal hotswap mechanism (triggered by JVMTI) to accept arbitrary class changes, rather than just meth
37.
by akeefer 15y ago
Depending on why you're restarting your VM, you may want to check out the DCEVM: http://java.net/projects/dcevm It lets you do arbitrary hotswapping of code, rather than only swapping method bodies. Not appropriate for production at thi
38.
An Apology for Agile: When to (Not) Use It and How to Make It Work(guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com)
1 points by akeefer 15y ago|0 comments
39.
by akeefer 15y ago
There's one question, regardless of if you believe this is "fair" or not, around whether structural inequality at this level is harmful to society regardless of fairness. I tend to believe it is, based on historical precedent of what happe
40.
by akeefer 15y ago
I finished undergrad in 2002, and no one was hiring then, even for Stanford CS grads. No one wanted people fresh out of school because there were so many unemployed engineers with 5+ years of experience that there was no incentive to tak
41.
by akeefer 15y ago
One thing my company has done since way back in its startup days (we're pretty successful at this point) is put an emphasis on working reasonable hours, and it's been successful for us. Some people still choose to work long hours because t
42.
by akeefer 15y ago
Defending against a patent lawsuit, regardless of how absurd or invalid the patent is, can often cost millions of dollars: http://www.inventionstatistics.com/Patent_Litigation_Costs.h... Filing patents isn't exactly free either, in terms
43.
by akeefer 15y ago
I was curious what their developer agreement actually says; I didn't bother signing up us a developer, but their FAQ states: "What is the payment structure between Amazon and me? Amazon pays developers 70% of the sale price of the app or 20
44.
by akeefer 15y ago
Ah, but that's where the problem is: just assuming that isomorphism is enough to justify patentability. While software can do the same things machines can do and are isomorphic in that sense, that doesn't imply that they're isomorphic i
45.
by akeefer 15y ago
I apologize if I came off as arrogant; this particular issue gets my hackles up a bit, and it frustrates me when I hear engineers espouse a dogma that I feel like isn't in their best interest. I think pretty much any engineer who's been af
46.
by akeefer 15y ago
That's totally incorrect. Why can't you draw the line at software? Books aren't patentable. Music isn't patentable. Paintings aren't patentable. Mathematical formulas aren't patentable. So why is it that you have to be against patents
47.
by akeefer 15y ago
As the article points out, software is also protected by copyright, and the article doesn't mention that it's covered by trade secret protection as well. The key difference is that patent protection applies to people who independently crea
48.
by akeefer 15y ago
There's no single reason why there are fewer women than men in programming, so asking if sexism is "the real reason" is asking the wrong question. Instead, you should ask, "is it a real reason" why there are fewer women in programming? I
49.
by akeefer 15y ago
Note that I said they "effectively" cover features rather than implementations. Technically they should cover implementations, but the reality is that they actually cover features, because the patents are so broad that they effectively cov
50.
by akeefer 15y ago
Software patents effectively cover features rather than implementations , so a patent troll (or a judge or jury) doesn't need to look at your source code to determine if you violated their patent: they really just need to be able to use
51.
by akeefer 15y ago
It's a bit disingenuous to talk about Scala without pointing out that the IDE tools are, from my understanding at least, fairly poor when compared with Java's tools. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use it, but if you're trying to convince
52.
by akeefer 15y ago
I think you're missing my point on the performance side; yes an ORM layer can help you identify slow queries, but it's pretty much the database query plan that will tell you why it's slow. Is it doing a full table scan instead of using an
53.
by akeefer 15y ago
Calling the author naive is, I think, uncharitable. I've also written my own ORM layer, used for large-scale, high-performance enterprise applications, and I largely agree with the original author's post, so I certainly don't think it's na
54.
by akeefer 15y ago
There are plenty of ways to skin that particular cat, and languages exist and are successful without modules or namespaces or classes (like C). It's just a question of whether or not the proposal in the article is an improvement upon anyth
55.
by akeefer 15y ago
Sure . . . I mean, C doesn't exactly have namespaces, and neither did PHP at first, and you can write code in them, so it's not that it's somehow not possible to uniquely name functions. But it's pretty annoying, and I'd say that many peop
56.
by akeefer 15y ago
Where all these grand proposals break down is when you actually have to deal with real, domain-specific problems. It's not too hard to clearly express what the split_string() function or the multiply() function do, so namespace collisions
57.
by akeefer 15y ago
That is an interesting point . . . OpenJDK itself is covered by the patent grants, but this is a patched version of OpenJDK. That said, the original research done here was sponsored by Oracle, and Thomas now works in Oracle Labs.
58.
by akeefer 15y ago
The ads were put there by wordpress, which we use to host the development blog; we're not so immensely retarded that we'd explicitly put them on ourselves to try to make money. Until recently (today? this week?) they've never been there,
59.
by akeefer 15y ago
My personal e-mail is in my profile, so I'm happy to participate in whatever manner you deem is best. Just send me an e-mail and let me know (or if you're in the Bay Area, you can catch me in person at SuperHappyDevHouse on Saturday).
60.
by akeefer 15y ago
Internally here at Guidewire, we have a declarative widget-based web framework for our apps, and we test by automatically generating a Page Object model based on the declarative widget definitions (using metaprogramming techniques in Gosu).

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