Code Freeze 2008 - No Fluff Just Stuff

Code Freeze 2008

Posted by: Nathaniel Schutta on December 30, 2007

As the year comes to a close, I wanted to note a few interesting things I’ve read of late. I’m sure I could come up with a few hundred words about each but the kid is napping so I’ll keep this short and to the point. I first ran across this quote on Daring Fireball (a must read BTW) but seeing it again on Reg Braithwaite’s Raganwald spurred me to post it here:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Well, that explains an awful lot.

Mike Nygard had an interesting post about some of the common pathologies we see in this silly industry. I found the part about negotiating particularly fitting but if you haven’t seen budgetculture, I’d love to know where you work. My friend Ted Neward has his annual prediction piece - lots of very interesting fodder hiding in there. All I have to say is Granny Schottenwilkins has been a proud Mac user for years but I’m sure there are some Windows 98 users in Wisconsin.

Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror reminds us that we all write shitty code. I’ve run into some amazingly arrogant developers that were convinced everything they wrote was pure gold, too bad they’re the types that generally don’t read, well, anything. Speaking of Jeff, I liked his take on registration keys though I’d point out that some companies trust their users…

Anyway, just a few good reads to finish off 2007. Happy New Year to all three of my readers!

Nathaniel Schutta

About Nathaniel Schutta

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect and Java Champion focused on cloud computing, developer happiness and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books, appeared in countless videos and many podcasts. He’s also a seasoned speaker who regularly presents at worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace (and evaluate) technical change. Driven to rid the world of bad presentations, he coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough, and he also published Thinking Architecturally and Responsible Microservices available from O’Reilly. His latest book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, is currently available in early release.

Why Attend the NFJS Tour?

  • » Cutting-Edge Technologies
  • » Agile Practices
  • » Peer Exchange

Current Topics:

  • Languages on the JVM: Scala, Groovy, Clojure
  • Enterprise Java
  • Core Java, Java 8
  • Agility
  • Testing: Geb, Spock, Easyb
  • REST
  • NoSQL: MongoDB, Cassandra
  • Hadoop
  • Spring 4
  • Cloud
  • Automation Tools: Gradle, Git, Jenkins, Sonar
  • HTML5, CSS3, AngularJS, jQuery, Usability
  • Mobile Apps - iPhone and Android
  • More...
Learn More »