Today I gave a presentation about ScalaTest at a local company. I showed ways ScalaTest integrates with JUnit and makes it easier to do some things that are harder to do with JUnit in Java. It made me curious to find out what JUnit users would say are their actual pain points today with JUnit.

I drove down to Boulder last weekend to participate in an open-spaces Python conference, speak at an eyes-forward programming conference, and attend a workshop on TurboGears 2. Here's what I learned.

In this blog, I attempt to answer a common question among Scala programmers: when would I opt to use an abstract type member instead of a generic type parameter in Scala API design?

I'm reading Po Bronson's "What Should I Do With My Life?" which is brilliant on many levels. For one thing, it's the anti-self-help book; it's just stories from talking to people, and by no means is everyone successful.

I will be giving the closing keynote at the Developer Day conference in Boulder, CO this coming Saturday, October 10. The goal of this conference is to be cheap and local, so I'm curious to see how it works.

Our typical approach to problem-solving is to invent something new. If you've been around the block a few times, it gets harder to convince you to jump into yet another untested scheme.

I recently held an exploratory meeting with a potential new client where we needed to share a screen over the internet. Neither of us had used DimDim but it did the trick with no snags.

Guidance & inspiration vs. directing & controlling.

Relational databases offer a rich toolset to help ensure the integrity of data. Apart from normalized schema, however, few enterprise applications take advantage of those tools and, instead, tend to implement integrity checking inside application layers. If SQL database constraints are useful, why aren't more applications taking advantage of them?

At the JVM Languages Summit, Josh Bloch expressed his concern about what he called the "semantic gap" between the source code we write and its performance at runtime: As performance improves, our ability to predict the performance consequences of our source code degrades.

After a conversation with a guy at work, I was inspired to take a look at whether Scala is inherently more complex than Java, and decided it wasn't.

My coauthor James Ward was here last weekend and we managed to debug the screencasting process and produce 6 screencasts. On his next visit we plan to finish creating a screencast for each chapter in the book.

Can a focus on C++ get me through the next twenty-odd years? Is it time to stop chasing bright, shiny new languages and consolidate as a guru? A few thoughts on "legacy languages" and the later stages of a coding career.

The internet takes a formerly-expensive cost (communication) and drives it to essentially zero. Any activity where communication is important is being disrupted. To find out how much, drive the result as far to the extreme as possible.

Scala has an Option type that provides a type-safe alternative to using null to represent optional values. In this blog post, I show how to replace nested conditionals involving Option with a for-expression.