Recently I’ve been getting spam from the “standards organisation” OASIS inviting a company that I don’t work for1{#footlink1:1327526703777.footnote} to join a new standards initiative. There’s no pretense that I’m being invited because of my clearly superior knowledge of the area involved, merely that the company could get great advertising exposure by participating – including being listed on a press release! Naturally we’d need to become OASIS members and pay the appropriate fee, and to be in the press release you’d have to be at minimum a “sponsor level member”.

HTML 5 Boilerplate reminded me of an old-school tool which is extremely useful for concatenating JS and CSS files on the fly – server side includes:

<FilesMatch ".*\.combined\.(js|css)$">
  Options +Includes
  SetOutputFilter INCLUDES
</FilesMatch>

Then you have a main scripts.combined.js (or css) which contains:

<!--#include file="libs/backbone-min.js" -->
<!--#include file="libs/underscore-min.js" -->
<!--#include file="libs/jquery-1.7.1.min.js" -->

Plus any other files you need, in the order you specify. This works great for development mode so you can change a file on the fly and just refresh the browser without running any kind of build script. When it comes time to push to production, it’s easy for a build script to process the file ahead of time and be confident that you’ll get exactly the same result.

This evening I stumbled across two interesting posts about alternate layouts for pairing rather than sitting side by side. Firstly Tom Dale talking about Tilde’s corner desk pairing setup (and some of the software setup they use) and that was inspired by Josh Susser’s face to face pairing setup at Pivotal Labs.

Both approaches require more floor space which makes them difficult to setup but I would expect the face to face pairing to be a heck of a lot better if done well. I’ve always preferred having separate screens in mirror configuration as well as separate keyboards and mice to allow the developers to sit a little further apart to be comfortable and to be able to look straight ahead at the screen. That said, I quite like having a second monitor for spreading out windows as we have at LMAX so it’s not clear cut which is better.

Yan Pritzker recently posted “5 ways to get insane productivity boosts for coders” which provides some good tips on how to improve your usage of tools when doing technical work. To summarise:

• Never look when you can search
• Don’t repeat yourself (by setting up shortcuts and command line aliases)
• Learn a scripting language
• Learn an editor (and use that editor everywhere)
• Learn regular expressions

However, nearly all of these tips really boil down to how to be more productive at writing text and the mechanics of writing code – editing actual source code files, jumping to different places in those files, executing commands more efficiently etc. Are these really the tasks that consume the vast majority of a developers time?

If you’re experiencing an issue when using Chrome with Google Maps where typing in a location and hitting enter either does nothing or just says “Loading…” forever, you’ve very likely hit upon a bug in the Skype click-to-call extension.

Skype automatically installs this “add-on” when you install Skype and it adds links to phone numbers so that you can click them to call on Skype. Unfortunately, Google Maps seems to be triggering a bug in the extension and so it is either corrupting the data returned to the Google Maps javascript or just preventing the request from ever returning.

Following on from my last post, Jason Adam Young has some excellent advice to help you continually get better and better and building software and perhaps more importantly, be more and more valuable to whoever you happen to be working for.

This afternoon during an interview, a potential new hire at LMAX asked what LMAX could offer in the way of career progression. Since I’ve been thinking a fair bit about what comes next in my career now that I’m moving back to Australia I thought I had a pretty good answer and that it might be worth sharing here2{#footlink2:1323196996971.footnote}.

In most industries career progression is signified by ever fancier sounding job titles, but for a software developer, the fancier the title sounds the less likely you are to actually do any development. Essentially, career progression often amounts to career migration – into “architecture”1{#footlink1:1323196219398.footnote} or managements. If you really love developing software though you need to look at it a different way. If I spend the rest of my career as a “Senior Software Engineer” I’ll be pretty happy, so long as I can keep honing my skills and becoming more valuable to the companies I work for. Ideally I’d like the pay I take home to grow in line with that value.

After four years living in the UK, my wife and I have decided to move back to Australia mid-February 2012 to be closer to family. As such, I’m now starting to look at job opportunities back in Oz. If you’re hiring, I’d love to hear from you and discuss how we might work together. My CV is available online to give you an idea of my experience and of course the backlog of this blog shows some of my thinking and learning throughout the years1{#footlink1:1322426906768.footnote}.

A couple of little patterns for writing long-poll based JavaScript applications have evolved in some internal apps I’ve been working on lately so I thought I’d document them for posterity.

Simple Long Poll Loop

Peter Lawrey posted an example of using the Exchanger class from core Java to implement a background logging implementation. He briefly compared it to the LMAX disruptor and since someone requested it, I thought it might be interesting to show a similar implementation using the disruptor.

Firstly, let’s revisit the very high level differences between the exchanger and the disruptor. Peter notes:

This approach has similar principles to the Disruptor. No GC using recycled, pre-allocated buffers and lock free operations (The Exchanger not completely lock free and doesn’t busy wait, but it could)

As of this morning, the Disruptor Wizard has been merged into the core LMAX Disruptor source tree. The .NET port had included the wizard style syntax for quite some time and it seemed to be generally popular, so why make people grab two jars instead of one?

I also updated it to reflect the change in terminology within the Disruptor. Instead of Consumers, there are now EventProcessors and EventHandlers. That better reflects the fact that consumers can actually add additional values to the events. Additionally, the ProducerBarrier has been merged into the ring buffer itself and the ring buffer entries are now called events. Again, that better reflects the fact that the programming model around the disruptor is most often event based.

The one problem I’ve found when upgrading to Lion is that suddenly iCal couldn’t sync to my Google Apps Calendar account – instead it repeatedly asked for the password. I’m still not really sure what caused this, but my solution was to simply delete both ~/Library/Preferences/*iCal* and ~/Library/Calendars. You really only want to do that if you exclusively use Google Calendar. If you have local calendars deleting ~/Library/Calendars will delete them.