Ruby's Open Classes – Or: How Not To Patch Like A Monkey by Werner Schuster
Rails developers who watched the recent Ruby 1.8.7 preview releases, soon noticed something about the 1.8.7 Preview 1: it broke Rails. The reason was the addition of a method Symbol#to_proc, which was backported from Ruby 1.9. Adding this method allows to write certain code in a more compact way (see details about Symbol#to_proc).
Continuous Integration: Was Fowler Wrong? It's about tests not builds by Eric Minick
While rereading Martin Fowler's classic paper, Continuous Integration, it struck me that its approach to Continuous Integration (CI) is fundamentally flawed. Fowler, like most of the CI community, seems to argue that CI is about building rather than testing. This basic misconception, permeating an otherwise good paper, has contributed to poor tool designs that are focused on build automation and, perhaps more importantly, an untold numbers of teams following bad practices.
Top 10 SOA Pitfalls by Rik de Groot, Viktor Grgic, Vincent Partington, and Gero Vermaas
Putting all pitfalls together in one simple 10 item list quickly reveals a grouping of types pitfalls. Number #1 and #2 are both related to organizational aspect. If the culture, mindset and attitude are not right, these are typically the pitfalls that a SOA endeavor may run in to. The next group covers the items #3 till #7, these are all related to architectural/design skills. And the last group, numbers #8 till #10, relates to implementation issues (although proper design could help to prevent these pitfalls from manifesting themselves).
Dynamic Languages Strike Back by Stevey's Blog Rants
Some guys at Stanford invited me to speak at their EE Computer Systems Colloquium last week. Pretty cool, eh? It was quite an honor. I wound up giving a talk on dynamic languages: the tools, the performance, the history, the religion, everything. It was a lot of fun, and it went over surprisingly well, all things considered.
