\n What does scale look like on WebLogic Server when the traffic graph turns ugly and the pager will not stop? Where do clusters actually help and where do they just move the pain around? What parts of the console matter on a weekday at noon and what parts matter…
Year: 2012
Apache Lucene Search Basics
Tonight Curiosity touched down on Mars and my feed was a blur of cheers and telemetry. It reminded me why I love search. You stare into the dark, you ask a question, and if your tools are good, you get a signal back. When you wire up Apache Lucene the…
Modular Applications with the NetBeans Platform
Build small things that fit well together and you will sleep better than the team that built one giant thing that fits nowhere. A rainy Tuesday and a stubborn monolith The coffee went cold while the stack traces kept growing. That was the whole vibe of the morning. One Swing…
Wicket Components: Stateful but Manageable
Apache Wicket gets a weird rep in Java circles. People love the HTML friendliness but get spooked by the word stateful. If you have been shipping apps on Tomcat or Jetty and someone told you Wicket will flood the session, stick around. From the trenches, Wicket components are stateful but…
Sling Models and HTL: Clean Templates
Creation date: 2012-06-25T00:28:14 Dev: Why do our CQ components turn into spaghetti the moment we touch JSPs? Me: Because we cram content logic, presentation, and null checks in the same file. We can do better. Picture clean templates that only show markup. Picture simple Java classes that hold the data….
Resource Overcommit: When It Works and When It Bites
Resource overcommit feels like free pizza until you realize who is paying the tab.In the lab it looks like magic. In production it works until it does not, and that moment arrives fast when the mix changes. Resource overcommit is the promise that sells virtualization. Run more guests than you…
The Diamond Operator Simplifies Life
I finally stopped squinting at angle brackets today, and it feels like my code exhaled. The Java diamond operator has been sitting in my editor for a while, but today it clicked for real. You know that little pair of empty brackets in new HashMap<>(). That is the one. It…
The business of software: Code and Cash Live Closer Than You Think
Software as a business sounds clean on a slide. In practice it is coffee stains, pager buzz, and the chat ping from a paying user who just hit a wall. That ping showed up for us at two fifty nine in the morning. A checkout event with no payment captured….
The business of software: Software Is Code But Business Is Promises Kept
Software as a Business sounds slick until your phone buzzes at 3 in the morning because your billing job tripped on a customer with a funny character in their company name. That was my Tuesday. Coffee in hand, log window wide open, I watched a queue of failed charges like…
Querying Graphs: Cypher Patterns for Product Teams
“When everything looks like a table, you write joins. When everything looks like a graph, you write stories.” Someone who shipped features on a Friday night Cypher is making the rounds in meetups and repo readme files, and if your team is poking at Neo4j this weekend, you are not…