A Case for Guard Clauses

One of my pet peeves in programming is that few people use guard clauses. A guard clause is an almost trivial concept that greatly improves readability. Inside a method, handle your special cases right away and return immediately.

New Project: JSysTest

I love unit tests and use them whenever possible. But in the end, there’s no substitute for a full scale system test. Only after system testing, you can be sure that everything works as intended. When I was looking for a way to test a REST-style JSON web service, I decided to create a small testing framework to simplify the task.

Google Collections Reaching 1.0

Exciting news for Java developers: The first 1.0 release candidate of Google Collections has been released. For almost a year I’ve been waiting for this, and now it seems the waiting will soon be over.

Simplifying Server Deployment

Configuring servers is tedious work if you operate a cluster of more than a few machines (if you’re a regular reader, you’ve heard about it). I’ve created a simple deployment framework that helps with building deployment packages based on central configuration templates. It is ant-based, so people from the Java world should have no problem to adjust it to their needs. Read on to find out how it works.

CAP, Consistent Hashing, etc.

I’ve been reading up on distributed systems again. For quite a while, my monthly copy of CACM has been my only connection to computer science topics. This time, I followed a few references and came across interesting concepts (most of them familiar from back in university).

Development Done Right

In my projects, I’ve always been the one who took care of infrastructure, standardization and quality assurance from the development perspective. The funny thing is that I’m no admin and no QA guy, so most of it wasn’t even my job. In this article, I’m going to list a few things that in my opinion as a software developer are essential to a professional software project.

Django on Google App Engine

I’m back to playing with the Django web development framework again. Since I’m close to putting something online (it’s only a matter of years, actually), I’m also looking into hosting options. Due to the framework choice, Google App Engine appeared on my radar and I had a quick look at it.

Keeping Wikis Useful

Most wiki-based documentation I have worked with has sooner or later turned into a tangled mess of outdated information. Some pages are maintained actively while others aren’t updated anymore and you never know how reliable the information still is. For a while I’ve been thinking about a simple technical solution to this problem. Here it is.