Software as a Business Part 1: Lessons from the Trenches. A hands on take on building and selling software, written from the keyboard of someone who ships, answers support at midnight, and stares at Stripe charts with coffee in hand. These are timeless lessons you can put to work right…
Category: Productivity & Workflow
Tools, techniques, and workflows that make developers more effective. IDEs, debugging, build tools, and productivity hacks for modern software development.
Why We Picked Broadleaf for a B2C Build
The day the cart fell over We had a cart melt on a Tuesday. Not a fun kind of melt. The Switch Product Variant Now button spiked traffic, the promo rules misfired, and we watched a checkout page take a long coffee break right when the email campaign hit send….
Debugging Containers: Into the Namespace
Problem framing Containers are everywhere in dev chats right now. Docker got a big bump with new networking and volumes, CoreOS is pushing rkt, Kubernetes keeps getting steadier. We ship faster, but when something breaks inside a container, the fix often feels like guesswork. Logs give hints. Metrics point to…
Build Pipelines for Polyglot JVM Projects
The JVM is no longer a one language town. Teams are mixing Scala services, Groovy build logic, Clojure tools, and a splash of JRuby scripts. The question is not if you can do polyglot on the JVM. You already are. The question is how your build pipeline keeps up. What…
Code Coverage that Informs, Not Deceives
Code coverage can be a flashlight or a fog machine. Shine it right and you see paths. Point it wrong and you walk into walls with a smile. Teams brag about eighty percent. Some push for a hundred. Numbers look clean on a dashboard. Bugs are not that polite. What…
Interoperability and Tooling: WS-* in Context
Everybody loves a clean JSON endpoint, but the code that keeps the lights on still speaks XML with a straight face.If you ship software across companies or stacks, you end up speaking WS star whether you like it or not. Put WS star in context. It was built for interoperability…
Building Offline-First Android Apps
Context The new Nexus phones are flying off shelves, Jelly Bean is smooth, and many of us are still on spotty 3G that drops to EDGE once you leave downtown. On the subway, in the air, or in the countryside, your app is either a faithful companion or a blank…
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…
Building Rich Clients on the NetBeans Platform
Last night a feature request landed at 5 PM. The kind that sounds small during standup and turns into a mini rewrite after dinner. Our Swing app had grown into a ball of listeners and wizards. Adding one more screen felt like threading a cable through a crowded server rack….
Jacoco and Friends: Wiring Coverage into CI
\n \n\n\n\n Created: 2011 12 03 00 59 46 \n\n We keep shipping faster and the walls between commit and prod keep moving closer. Jenkins grew out of Hudson and is now everywhere on the floor. GitHub is where half of our code lives and pull requests are the new…