Brugge Blog

I think most people have a pretty good image of what “craftsmanship” connotes: skill, care, attention to detail, and beautiful results, usually from someone like a cabinet maker or a violin maker. But it’s encouraging to see the same ideas being used to try setting a similar path for professional development in programming. The idea […]

It was a year ago last November that I got the chance to step in to a different kind of working world, and I’ve got to say it’s been a life changer. Benetech, where I’m working on the new generation of Bookshare.org, is out to change the world, but in places that very few other […]

In the world of Java development, the two top choices for build tools are Ant and Maven. Like Coke and Pepsi, or any other good two-headed field, the choice provides endless voice to discussions of which is better. What is interesting to me in the threads, though, is that when people praise or defile Maven, […]

One of the most dangerous time for a project is the day immediately after someone has been to a conference. They’ve been wowed by some new tool or technology and can’t wait to use it. “Man, we should be using WangDoogle4J instead of Struts. I went to a session about it, and it blows everything […]

Software development is a team sport. Places can try to hide that fact with cubicles and individual assignments, but the fact remains that putting a system together takes a diverse group of people to pull it off: managers, developers, users, testers, writers, the list of roles goes on. But how often is thought put into […]

Dashboards are in. Dashboards are happening. It’s what automation is supposed to be about: to be the crowbar against an accumulation of feedback. Getting data is the first step, being able to interpret it is where the action starts.
I’ve wanted to have an all-in-one-page view of a project’s metrics for years now, ever since seeing […]

The techno debates about one technology versus another are often hard to follow unless you’re pretty well versed in the specific technologies, and with the number of acronyms and tools expanding daily, most of the debates end up in relative obscurity. If and when you do need to understand them, the best hope you have […]

While googling around recently, curious to know of any news of an old friend and methodologist, Jeff Alger, I came across a recent blog post on his methodology, Solution Based Modeling (SBM), and the book that details it, Developing Object Oriented Software For The Macintosh. [Note: while the book is out of print, there is […]

Nobody really trusts a 1.0 release, but you have to start somewhere to get the tires kicked. To that end, I’ve updated Glean with fixes for a couple of the tool scripts and added some new tools, and am cutting that as a 1.1 release. No need to put off using it any more.
The new […]

I’ve written a small framework of Ant scripts, that I call Glean, that drive a set of open-source tools to generate source code analysis, documentation and metrics for Java projects. It’s available for download, and distributed under an MIT License.
For starters, I have scripts packaged to drive a number of tools that can give you […]