Most interesting links of May ’12

This was a rich month, bringing some hope for ORM, providing a peep-hole into the bright and awesome future with in-browser video and other cool web-stuff presented at WebRebels 2012 and IDEs providing immediate feedback and visualisation. There were valuable articles about simplicity and quality in software and good talks about the lean startup (i.e.

Bad Code: Too Many Object Conversions Between Application Layers And How to Avoid Them

Have you ever worked with an application where you had to copy data from one object to another and another and so on before you actually could do something with it? Have you ever written code to convert data from XML to a DTO to a Business Object to a JDBC Statement? Again and again

Beautiful Code: Simplicity Yields Power

In Simple Made Easy argues Rich Hickey that mixing orthogonal concerns introduces unnecessary complexity and that we should keep them separate. This mixing sometimes occurs on such a basic level that we believe that there is no other way to do it, an example being the interleaving of polymorphism and hierarchical namespacing represented by OO

Creating On-Demand Clusters in EC2 with Puppet

For a recent project I needed to be able to start on-demand clusters of machines in Amazon EC2. We needed each instance in a cluster to allow SSH and sudo access for all team members and to install and configure the software appropriate for that cluster (“database” node or “testclient” node). You can see the