Thoughts about software development

Few weeks ago in the middle of my summer vacation I had a sudden motivation spike when I was browsing my backlog/notepad (analog i.e. paper & pen) where I write down ideas or problems I'd like solve or try out at some point. Two items in the backlog caught my eye and those two produced a third idea in the form of this blog post. Backlog items On my backlog I had two separate items that caught my interest. First item on backlog was a utility library for validating Finnish social security numbers (SSN, HeTu, henkilötunnus) and business identifications (y-tunnus). Both of these have predefined rules on how they are formed and I have implemented utilities for these same validations a few times in the past. I have discussed about the need for these utilities many times and last time just before my summer vacation with my colleagues because these exact utilities don't exist in the public repositories or if they do we haven't found them and many of us had implemented t...

Everybody has their favorite when it comes to cars, sports or jeans and the same goes for work tools. Some prefer OS X over Linux or Maven over Gradle and don't even get me started on browser wars. I've had my share of trying out different tools to choose the ones I want to use but every now and then I change some of my tools. This time I'm telling what my day to day tools currently are and why I changed one of them. The solid foundation When I get to choose my tools there's one solid foundation that works as a base for all other tools. This has been my number one choice for over ten years with a little variety over time. Linux. No question about it, I've used for years, I know my way around it and it offers everything I need in work and at home. The variety comes from different distributions and desktop environments although those have also been very stable for the past four or five years, Debian has the stability I want and XFCE offers everything I need fr...

On the second day I didn't make as much notes as I did on the first. That doesn't mean that the session weren't interesting I just focused more on listening. I attended eight session on the second day where the last one was the most memorable one by Dan North but I'll go through them chronologically. Some of the text is word to word notes from the presentations and some are my view of how I understud and processed the topic in my mind. Building scalable, highly concurrent and fault-tolerant systems: Lessons learned Jonas Bonér told what makes systems slow and what kind of solutions can be used to speed them up or at least speed up the response to the user.  First lesson to learn is There are no free lunches . If you use some approach it affects to something else. Some might use the phrase There are no silver bullets which means the same thing or at least that's how I undestud it. Second topic was about concurrency. Mutables and threads isn't a go...

This was my first time at JFokus but hopefully not last. I wasn't quite sure what to except. I had heard good things about the confrence and knew that it was quite big. It was more and better than I expected. There were over 1500 attendees and great session from beginning to end. If i get the opportunity to go again I'm most definitely going again. On the first day I attended six sessions. I'm not going to write all my notes here but I'll try to give good summary of each session and the rest can be read from JFokus website where you can find presentation materials for both days. Taking development to the edge This was the keynote of JFokus embedded, M2M & internet of things miniconfrence. In the future everything is connected to each other and to the internet by everything meaning absolutly everything. Cars can share information of traffic, houses can tell if all the doors are closed and locked or the are the lights on. Smart homes didn't succeed 10-1...

I attended Vaadin meetup with a few colleagues on a way to JFokus 2013 and thought I should share my notes of the two. First post is about vaadin meetup that took place on a cruise from Turku to Stockholm. I made notes of three presentations and one of them I had high expectations. There were also two other presentations that I didn't make any notes of. Vaadin 7 Vaadin released Vaadin 7 framework the same day that the meetup was on so they had a presentation where they told about new features and future plans. I'm more of a backend programmer than UI programmer so my notes of this were pretty brief but here it goes. Whats new Servlets and HTTP-sessions are controllable by the programmer Multiple UI classes e.g. One for web browsers and one for mobile web browsers GWT is now build-in Support for external JavaScript modules What to expect in the future Faster relase cycles maintenance release every two weeks Dynamic CSS injection Vaadin CDI, thei...