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 […]

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 […]

If you have ever had to understand a database structure, with or without printed documentation, you will appreciate SchemaSpy, the kind of tool I always like (generating documentation from a source) and which I’ve needed of late. Need an entity-relationship diagram? Done. Need a data dictionary? Done. Point this at your database and it does […]

If there’s one thing that programmers dislike more than writing documentation of their code, it’s creating diagrams of their code. For Java developers, the Javadoc tool was a huge step forward, letting you create up-to-date browsable documentation in a heartbeat. Now you can do the same thing with UML thanks to the good folks who […]

The diversity of operating systems in my daily life has expanded recently, and it’s an interesting change. At work I’ve gone from Windows XP and a smattering of HP-UX, to Linux and a smattering of XP. At home I’ve gone from XP to OS X.
My first reaction to the change was to celebrate the […]

There seems to be some small groundswell of attention to Dependency Management lately, although it may always be something of a fringe topic. In particular, I’m talking about it’s meaning as in “making decisions about the structure of your system so that it has the kinds of dependencies between pieces that you want.” It’s important, […]

Back at one of the No Fluff Just Stuff Java symposiums in 2003, Dave Thomas had an introductory talk on Ruby that he advertised as being worth it just for the fact that learning some Ruby would change the way you approach Java. I haven’t played with Ruby much yet, but when I asked Dave […]

Ned Batchelder brought up an interesting piece on “old bugs” that bug Joshua Bloch recently found in, of all things, the classic binary sort algorithm. The standard algorithm that everyone has been using for some fifty years has apparently had a bug waiting to happen. It’s dealing with an edge condition, but that’s where […]