Friday, July 23, 2010

Hands-free Coding: Code Generation with Annotation Processors

I'm speaking at Houston TechFest on October 9! My talk is Hands-free Coding: Code Generation with Annotation Processors. Wish me luck. Here's the summary:

Have you ever written hundreds or thousands of lines of boilerplate code, or struggled to write Java idioms correctly every time? There is great way to save time and effort and use to standard code patterns automatically: Code Generation.

In this talk, I will walk you through using the JDK6 Annotation Processor API together with Velocity templates to read your Java source code and write new Java source files for you from code templates. It is magic, but magic you can understand and use to be more productive.

Let the compiler write your code for you!

Please come watch!

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Lua coming to LOTRO

With Lua coming to LOTRO I may have to dust off my Lua, last used in hacking at T.o.M.E.. It will be a nice break from Java and work, and give me something nice to do for my wife who doesn't know (yet) about MMORPG add-ons.

Saturday, July 03, 2010

JB Rainsberge's 10 things

Courtesy of Naresh Jain comes J B Rainsberge's list of 10 things to stop doing or he will bury you alive in a box (about 1hr30m of video), a really delightful presentation on agile.

For the impatient, the list (which is only about half the presentation):

  1. Stop writing comments that describe what the code does
  2. Stop working in code bases with compile errors
  3. Stop insisting that writing the tests after is just as good as writing the tests before
  4. Stop insisting that evolutionary design leads to poor architecture
  5. Stop writing tests for "coverage"
  6. Stop arguing about whether a story is done
  7. Stop trying to increase your velocity
  8. Stop breaking up working teams
  9. Stop acting as though agile is "what the project teams do"
  10. Stop telling your people to "go agile" on their own

Go watch the whole thing, and please, Stop It.