A clever fellow at my work posted a link to Numbers everyone should know. When speed matters, you need to know what is cheap and what is dear.
Dear Oscar Wilde said "What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." But Alan Perlis countered, "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing."
Learn your costs, the value you get for them, and the price you pay.
Felix Raab posts Ruby Development on Windows, a practical getting started guide. I've seen similar instructions elsewhere. This one is a little different in that he walks you through setting up Microsoft ConsolePowerShell instead of Cygwin. I want to give this a try.
This post is gentle ribbing at the best developer I work with at JPMorgan: Mike Doberenz. He is a big Eclipse fan, I am an IntelliJ fan. It's a little like the Emacs-v-vi flame war except that there is an actual argument in favor of Eclipse.
Martin Mikkelborg writes a helpful post on preferring IntelliJ to Eclipse for Android development.
As Mike and I often observe, folks like me feel IntelliJ is better than Eclipse. But I also believe the development model of Eclipse is likely to win out in the long run (units arbitrary):
However, JetBrains has done brilliant work lately in bringing out a free, community edition and keeping their API accessible to plugin authors. It will be interesting to watch the contest of editors over the next few years.
Here is JetBrains explaining how they succeed in an interview with Michael Hunger.
I'm looking forward to IntelliJ IDEA X (10), due real soon now. Typical of the incremental improvements every release has is How to Run a Single Inspection in IDEA X?.
I've been running the preview releases for a while now, and have noticed to my delight that version X is generally faster and lighter-weight than 9 or 8. Faster, better — what's not to like?
Helpful sysadmin tip from Jason White (jasonjgw), philosopher cum Linux expert, on finding broken symlinks.
Devlin Liles of Improving Enterprises writes of his type at Tyson: Lessons Learned: A Developer Retrospective. My favorite piece of advice is the first one: Always Say Yes:
If the user wants you to write a program that will send unmanned spaceships to hundreds of planets and safely get them back. Say yes. The time, money, effort, and return on investment should be the determining factors for a request, not the developers opinion.
I'd love to build that project.
Like a programming René Magritte, Robert Smith tells us that LISP does not have lists and it does not have parentheses. To be fair, he is right.
Sri Lankan Hiranya Jayathilaka posts on Java 6 GC algorithms and tuning. This goes in my bookmarks.
I found a real gem in this e-mail exchange featuring Patrick Naughton. This part jumped out at me (written by Sean Luke):
As I remember my Java history Patrick Naughton the gentleman who got the ball rolling was about to quit Sun and join up with NeXT. He happened to be on the same intermural hockey team as Scott McNealy. Scott told him to hold off, write what he thought was wrong with Sun before he left. Patrick didn't leave and was one of the original Oak people.
This is amazing! McNealy was the right kind of manager. Naughton discussed his interests in leaving Sun with McNealy, McNealy asked for feedback and helped Naughton start a new project.
The Internet is filled with tales of the other kind of boss.
Also, I should join my boss' team.
A great post from Jonathan Rasmusson (author of The Agile Samurai) on successful project inception. I wish I had his slide deck.
