Scientific debugging - take 2 # Back in - OMG was that really back in 2010? - 2010 I wrote a post on scientific debugging. Today I was reminded of this post as I actually had the pleasure of watching this principle carried out - except this was for a medical “bug” instead of one in a piece of software. To quote the book Why programs fail the method of scientific debugging consists of 5 easy to follow steps: ...
Children tinkering # Years ago I decided that in case I got the same question for at least three times I would write down the answer and put it somewhere online in a more or less public location that I can link to. The latest question I got once too often came from daddies (mostly, sorry - not even a handful of moms around me, let alone moms who are into tech) looking for ways to get there children in touch with technology. ...
Don’t dream it, be it # After two years in a row of receiving 120 submissions for Berlin Buzzwords from the usual crowd - young, white, male, caucasian - only this year we decided we needed to work towards increasing diversity.One piece in the puzzle was to get in touch with several Berlin local “tech for non-tech” people groups. In a content exchange kind of setting I was asked to do an interview as some kind of role model. ...
On geeks growing up # I’m a regular visitor of the Chemnitzer Linuxtage in March - at first going to talks learning lots of interesting stuff I didn’t know about like aspect oriented programming, strace, squeak, which open source licenses are best for different strategies. As of late I had been there mostly to help out with the FSFE booth. For context: The conference itself is hosted by the technical university in Chemnitz, it takes place on a weekend, they charge the tiny amount of 5 Euros for admission. ...
Hello elasticsearch # First of all a disclaimer: I had a little bit of time left during the last few weeks. As a result my blog migrated from dynamic wordpress content to statically hosted pages. If anything looks odd, in case you find any encoding issues, if you miss specific functionality - please do let me know. I’ll switch from this beta url back to the old sub-domain in a week or so unless there are major complaints. ...
Building online communities - from the 0MQ trenches # After seeing several talks on how open source communitites are organised at FOSDEM, on how to license open source software strategically at Chemnitzer Linuxtage and on how to nurture open source communities at Berlin Buzzwords over the past couple of years during the past year or so I’ve come to read quite a few articles and books on the art of building online communities. ...
Wonder if you should switch from your RDBMS to Apache Hadoop: Don’t! # Last weekend I spend a lot of fun time at FrOSCon* in Sankt Augustin - always great to catch up with friends in the open source space. As always there were quite a few talks on NoSQL, Hadoop, but also really solid advise on tuning your system for stuff like MySQL (including a side note on PostgreSQL and Oracle) from Kristian Köhntopp. ...
JAX: Project Nashorn # The last talk I went to was on project Nashorn - demonstrating the capability to run dynamic languages on the JVM by writing a JavaScript implementation as a proof of concept that is fully ECMA compliant and still performs better than Mozilla’s project Rhino. It was nice to see Lisp, created in 1962, referenced as being the first language that featured a JIT compiler as well as garbage collection. ...
JAX: Tales from production # In a second presentation Peter RoÃbach together with Andreas Schmidt provided some more detail on what the topic logging entails in real world projects. Development messages turn into valuable information needed to uncover issues and downtime of systems, capacity planning, measuring the effect of software changes, analysing resource usage under real world usage. In addition to these technical use cases there is a need to provide business metrics. ...
JAX: Logging best practices # The ideal outcome of Peter RoÃbach’s talk on logging best practices was to have attendees leave the room thinking ``we know all this already and are applying it successfully’’ - most likely though the majority left thinking about how to implement even the most basic advise discussed. From his consultancy and fire fighter background he has a good overview of what logging in the average corporate environment looks like: No logging plan, no ...