Koans: nicest way to learn a language

By on September 18, 2011 in General

Just a quick one to let everybody know how cool I think the ‘koans’ idea is. I think the Ruby guys started out with their excellent Ruby Koans and I certainly had fun doing them. I have already been a Groovy user for a while, so didn’t really need to do go through its koans. [...]

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Five bad habit of software developers

By on September 12, 2011 in General

Now that I have been in the software engineering game for about twelve years, I thought this would be the right time to list some bad developer habits. Some habits that may remind you of a few colleagues, and possibly yourself. It goes without saying that I have never exhibited any of them, personally.

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Weekend fun with the Dutch Railways API

By on April 4, 2011 in General

Recently, Dutch Rail (called NS in Holland) made an API available. I thought I would put it to use.

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J2EE in 2011 AD

By on March 30, 2011 in General

Recently I enabled one of those “here’s a contract you might like” email services again. I was horrified.

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Musings of an independent start-up developer: a project postmortem

By on March 25, 2011 in General

Over the past months, I have been working on my own niche social network site. In this rather personal post I try to look back and reflect, post-mortem. Maybe there’s something in it for you.

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My experiences with Grails

By on March 16, 2011 in General

For a private project, I have been using Grails for a couple of months now, and altogether it was a very pleasant experience. In this post I would like to highlight some aspects of it.

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Tricking Google Appengine into compiling jspx files

By on June 16, 2010 in General

I ran into a little gotcha the other day. Appengine was refusing to compile and process my .jspx files. The solution was horribly simple.

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GWT moves forward rapidly

By on May 29, 2010 in General

So much has been happening in the GWT community lately that I wanted to write a posting summarizing those developments and why they matter.

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‘They won’t let me refactor!’

By on May 25, 2010 in General

In recent projects, I have found that developers often avoid company politics, even if it is detrimental to the quality of the software they’re working on. I think they should join the political arena.

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Appengine persistence: just say no to JPA and JDO?

By on March 30, 2010 in General

I have been experimenting with writing an application for the Java edition of Google Appengine, which I blogged about before. Back then, I was still trying to use JPA with the Datastore, but the longer I was trying, the more I got the feeling that JPA (and JDO)  just don’t fit Google’s Datastore very well. [...]

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