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Essays and opinions

A collection of blog posts and opinions from the last decade.

Visualizing binary search trees with GraphStream

The binary search tree algorithm (BST) is one of the most fundamental algorithms in computer science, enhancing tree structures with characteristics that combine the optimal insert with the efficiency of search in an ordered array. Learn this important algorithm by visualizing BSTs with GraphStream, a graph library for Java.

Demystifying machine learning

Classical software is primarily based around the notion of decision trees. Any programmer who has coded an if-else-then statement can understand the basics of data science.

Give credit and take blame

When success is ultimately achieved, give the credit to others. There will be time for you to internalize your own impact on the success of a project.

How to model reactive systems with event storming

A successful Event Storming session — as well as a successful software project — demands equal parts art, knowledge, and technical skill. Also, it’s much cheaper to make changes to sticky notes than production code. Nothing in this article requires technical expertise or previous experience with reactive, event-driven systems.

What makes the Play framework fast?

Play embraces a fully reactive programming model through the use of futures for asynchronous programming, work stealing for maximizing available threads, and Akka for distribution of work. Not only does Play have some extreme advantages over servlet-based web frameworks, it also has full support for two of the most popular languages on the JVM, Java and Scala.

Goodbye, Lightbend

It’s been an incredible two-and-a-half years.

Five process improvements to uplift developers

Process improvement is the most impactful way to rise above your individual work and impact the overall capacity of the company you work for. All organizations live and die by the quality of their processes.

Diving into Akka Streams

Akka Streams is a toolkit for per-event processing of streams. It’s an implementation of the Reactive Streams specification, which promises interoperability between a variety of compliant streaming libraries. If you want to get hands-on with streaming, you've come to the right place.

A journey into Reactive Streams

Rather than acting on data at rest, modern software increasingly operates on data in near real-time. Big data is less important than fast data, and fast data is crucial to fast knowledge.

Reflecting on reactive systems

Reactive systems are at the heart of a new breed of enterprise system that fully embraces modern infrastructure.

What is reactive programming?

To understand Reactive — both the programming paradigm and the motivation behind it — it helps to understand the challenges that are faced by developers and companies today compared to the challenges faced only a decade ago.

Transitioning to Scala

Advice from a developer who helped rebuild Walmart.ca with Scala and Play.

Agile and Waterfall can live together in harmony

Agile is challenging to use on certain projects, like those bound by fixed-price, fixed-date contracts. Agencies, governments, and other organizations who are bound by contracts struggle to implement Agile effectively. We'll explore ways that we can borrow the best processes from Agile when we're bound by the limitations of fixed-price contracts and statements of work.

The business value of joy

Joy isn't the typical emotion that comes to mind when one pictures enterprise software and enterprise software developers, but technical culture is changing rapidly and more people are recognizing the business value of joy. It's an exciting time to be a software developer.

Multiplayer tic-tac-toe in Java using Netty (NIO)

It was big news in 2010 when Twitter migrated their search from Ruby on Rails to Java-based Netty. Not only was it big in the news department, but it was also big in the results department: Twitter reported their search performance increased by 3x. In this post we'll explore Netty by using it to build a game of multiplayer tic-tac-toe.

Fixing Fancybox with AJAX (and Wicket)

A page I'm working on accepts multiple image uploads. Once the images are successfully processed asynchronously on the server, an image panel on the same page is automatically refreshed. The AJAX callback works fine and updates the panel view with the newly uploaded photos, but the net result is that Fancybox stops working completely.

Connection pooling with Hibernate 3.3.x and C3P0

Hibernate uses it’s own built-in connection pool out of the box. There are some pretty heavy duty sites running with the default connection pool enabled in production despite the obvious warning against doing this.

Beyond Java

We explore a Forrester report which asserts that Java is a dead end for enterprises and business software should be built with a 4GL such as webMethods. Let's explore why Java won't disappear from the enterprise any time soon.

The future of Java in the enterprise

Java is a utilitarian, status-quo ecosystem for getting things done, albeit not very quickly. This is a good thing. Instead of worrying about sharp edges, developers get to work with a very stable, very slow moving target. What's the future hold for enterprise Java developers?

Desire paths

A desire path represents the evolutionary nature of how people interact with their environment. An engineer designs a concrete path, but people find it more convenient to create their own. Software isn't any different. Users bump up against the limitation of an application but find their own workaround through sheer necessity.

The greatest line of code ever

Look at this piece of code to be reminded of the magnificence of code reviews. Hallelujah.

Integrating Uploadify with Java using Apache Wicket

One of the most requested features on any site that accepts file submissions is the ability to handle multiple uploads elegantly. The current HTML standard only permits one file upload at a time, which makes transferring a large number of files quite tedious. This tutorial will show how to painlessly integrate Uploadify and Java using Apache Wicket.

Be a revolutionary

Good developers always try to deliver amazing software in spite of obstacles. The perfect methodology for our team may not integrate well with the rest of the organization. The perfect programming language may be unknown to most developers on the team. The perfect architecture may require three months to develop but the deadline is three weeks away. Good developers embrace a harmonious balance between pragmatism and idealism.

Apache Aries: OSGi for the Enterprise

It looks like enterprise developers are in for a real treat: the missing secret sauce that allows enterprise application developers to harness the goodness of OSGi.

Don't forget team structure

In my experience I've noticed that flexible and adaptable organizations produce flexible and adaptable applications. Rigid and inflexible organizations tend to produce rigid and inflexible applications. Co-incidence?

Is SOA doomed?

The spirit of SOA is fantastic; adaptable, flexible, maintainable, loosely-coupled applications supported by open governance, strong relationships between business and technology folks, and co-operation across all silos and levels of an organization. What's not to love? We'll explore the pitfalls of SOA and explore the future of SOA in the enterprise.

This work by Kevin Webber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.