Most interesting links of February ’14

Recommended Readings Development Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – summary: there are no rules that apply to names, do not assume anything (my favourite: 12 + 13) Nathan Marz: Principles of Software Engineering, Part 1 – Nathan has worked with Big Data at Twitter and other places and really knows the perils or large, distributed, real-time systems and

Protected: JavaServer Faces Are Evil (draft)

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Handling Deployments When Provisioning JBoss domain.xml (With Ansible)

It is tricky to manage JBoss with a provisioner such as Puppet or Ansible because its domain.xml contains not only rather static configuration but also sections that change quite often such as deployments. So how can we manage the static parts of domain.xml with f.ex. Ansible while still enabling developers to deploy at will via

Seek Understanding

The most important lesson I have learned in 2013 is that I won’t change anything by writing critical blog posts and talking to like-minded people. Fostering the “we vs. them,” we who are right vs. them idiots sentiment is ineffective, even destructive. To be able to achieve anything, I have to talk to the people

The Risks Of Big-Bang Deployments And Techniques For Step-wise Deployment

If you ever need to persuade management why it might be better to deploy a larger change in multiple stages and push it to customers gradually, read on. A deployment of many changes is risky. We want therefore to deploy them in a way which minimizes the risk of harm to our customers and our companies. The

Demonstration of Ansible Features With Control & Test VMs

I have created a small project to demonstrate some features of Ansible, the new DevOps hotness, including Vagrant VMs for running Ansible and for testing the configuration. Either go straight to https://github.com/jakubholynet/ansible-example-with-vm or continue reading the copy & paste here. This project has three things of interest: A non-trivial Ansible configuration that demonstrates couple of

JBoss Modules Suck, It’s Impossible To Use Custom Resteasy/JAX-RS Under JBoss 7

Since JBoss EAP 6.1 / AS 7.2.0 is modular and you can exclude what modules are visible to your webapp, you would expect it to be easy to ignore the built-in implementation of JAX-RS (Rest Easy 2.3.6) and use a custom one (3.0.6). However, sadly, this is not the case. You are stuck with what

A Secret Weapon Against Technical Debt

(Cross-posted from blog.iterate.no.) Technical debt is not the only monster we have to fight – it has a hidden evil twin,  as pointed out by Niklas Björnerstedt: Competence Debt. The rope of ignorance that binds our hands and suffocates us by fear so that we don’t dare to change the system. Technical debt makes change difficult