Category Archives: Software Development

CircuitBreaker Pattern in Grails

I just released the CircuitBreaker Plugin for Grails. I recently read Michael Nygard’s book Release It, which is based on his experiences from the trenches in tracking down the causes of large system failures. He relates a number of his … Continue reading

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Grails 1.1 is finally here!

Today is a big day for everyone interested in Groovy and Grails. Following quickly on the release of Groovy 1.6, today Grails 1.1 has been released. This is a major milestone for the framework and I can’t wait to get … Continue reading

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How do you feel about your software project?

Happy? Sad? Disgusted? Nat Pryce wrote a program to find out how developers feel about their projects. He extracts code comments and feeds them into Synesketch. Nat has even posted results from a number of different open source (and a … Continue reading

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Use PNG files without the guilt

I have been a big fan of the PNG image format for several years, or I should really say I am a fan of the alpha-transparency* you can achieve with the 24 and 32-bit versions of the format (you get … Continue reading

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Sumatra: Javascript testing framework in Groovy

About six months ago, Jesse and I were talking about how much Javascript code we had been writing and how it would be nice to have better (or any) test coverage of that code. I had used Selenium a little … Continue reading

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iPhone Apps Gone Wild!

There is plenty to be said for (and against) the new iPhone and all the new apps flooding to our screens but aside from the sluggish response times and occasional crashes, the biggest problem I have is keeping track of … Continue reading

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Lean-to’s got agile project tracking covered

Lean-to is live! We haven’t done a great job of keeping the work we have been doing under wraps but we haven’t been promoting it either. Since we gave a demo of our agile project tracking application, Lean-to, at minnebar … Continue reading

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Nine things developers want more than money

This is a little bit older, but pretty interesting: Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money. It should be inherently obvious, but seeing lists like this every once in a while is a good reminder that creating and maintaining high-performing … Continue reading

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Best Buy tries its hand at being small.

Much has been written in blogs and in the news media about Best Buy’s Results Only Work Environment (ROWE). And while the idea (do whatever you want, work however you like, as long as you get your work done.) is … Continue reading

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git init

Jason Rudolph has a great post discussing getting started with git, the new kid on the block for version control. That post alone makes a compelling argument to me for trying it out. This quote hit a little too close … Continue reading

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