Your data is not just rows and columns. It is people, clicks, events and choices bumping into each other.When those bumps carry meaning, a graph database like Neo4j starts to feel less like a trend and more like the right tool. Graph thinking beats table thinking when relationships carry the…
Category: Software Engineering
Comprehensive insights into building, architecting, and managing software systems. From code craftsmanship to team dynamics, explore the technical and organizational aspects of software development.
Analytics for Product Teams: Questions before Dashboards
Dashboards are sugar. They taste good at standup and give you a rush in front of the team. Then the crash hits and the questions return. If you build products, the win is not a pretty chart. The win is knowing which question matters right now and making the screen…
CI for Performance Tests: Treating Speed as a Feature
\n We shipped on a Friday night. Big promo. Fresh build. Buzzing chat room. Traffic started to roll in and then everything felt like wading through cold syrup. Spinners everywhere. Our APM graphs drew a perfect ski slope. Engineers scrambled, product looked worried, and the chat turned quiet. The code…
First Steps with Android: Activities, Intents, Lifecycles
\n KitKat just landed and the Nexus 5 buzz is real. Android Studio is in preview while many of us still ship apps with Eclipse ADT. Tools aside, the first wall new Android folks hit is always the same: what is an Activity, what is an Intent, and why does…
Versioning and Queries in JCR
If you spend your days near a Java Content Repository you already know two topics keep coming back in standups. Versioning and queries. You either broke a branch of content and need to rewind time, or you wrote a query that looks smart but eats the CPU for breakfast. After…
The business of software: Price Like You Mean It
Everyone is talking about subscriptions. Twitter is warming up for an IPO, Adobe pushed everyone to Creative Cloud, and iOS got a full repaint. Feeds are full of new apps and new SaaS dashboards. The loud part is launches. The quiet part is making rent. This is about that quiet…
The business of software: Raise the Bar or Get Buried
Context Apple pushed iOS 7 yesterday and every app on my phone looks like it went on a juice cleanse. Flat colors, cleaner lines, and a loud message to every product team out there. Raise the bar or get buried by the next update. Twitter just said they filed for…
Escaping, Encoding, and Boundaries
Escaping, encoding, and boundaries sound like small plumbing details, right up until your app starts printing JavaScript popups that you never wrote. If you ship code on the web, this topic is not trivia. It is daily survival. Apple just pushed iOS 7 and every team I know is racing…
AEM Workflows for Real Editorial Teams
AEM workflows are sold as the safety net for content. In real newsrooms and brand teams, they can also be the bottleneck. The trick is turning the out of the box models into something editors actually use when the clock is ticking. Today’s piece is about Adobe CQ5 slash AEM…
Testing Wicket UIs: Selenium and Beyond
Testing Wicket UIs sits in a weird spot. On one side you have WicketTester flying through component checks in milliseconds. On the other side you have Selenium clicking real buttons, waiting for Ajax, and catching the stuff that only shows up when a browser gets involved. If you ship forms,…