IT consulting is an odd place to be when it comes to software engineering practices. We often end up writing software for business groups that have fixed budgets and more importantly fixed deadlines. We also try to follow an agile methodology for software development that roughly follows scrum (warning: PDF), but with defined roles for a project manager and a development lead. Today’s post discusses some of the difficulties seen in using Agile to deliver business software and how we can mitigate those difficulties, basically things that worked and things that didn’t. ...

Being an IT consultant has occasionally had me working in unusual or cramped quarters at client offices, the result of being hired help instead of a full time employee. One type of psychical situation I have ended up working in a few times is something we called “the project war room.” ...

Something introduced fairly early in programming courses is the concept of an interface. In practice interfaces help to define the boundaries between components of a system, define the behavior of underlying implementors of the interface, and make it easier to switch implementations of said behavior down the road. Today’s post offers a few thoughts on where interfaces should and should not be used. ...

Today we will look at whether it’s worth developer time to pre-size ArrayList objects in Java application code. We will take a similar approach to the one taken in a prior post on how long it takes to handle an exception in Java. ...

Today post is exceptional, we’ll take a brief look at the time cost of throwing and re-throwing exceptions and put that time cost in context. To be specific, we’ll look at the timing information for a set of exceptions which might be found in a typical 3-tier business application. In our example the exceptions are thrown and caught in hierarchical order in order to promote separation between the tiers of the application. ...

Previously we have discussed one approach and gave some implementing code for providing time zone adjusted date times to client web applications. Within the space of user facing web applications there are few different approaches to handling the storage and transmission of date time information. Today we will look at a couple broader themes for delivery of date times to client applications from servers and some thoughts on how to do it well. ...

This is short post about a couple issues that end users might run into when using a method of displaying dates I described in a prior post. In short, Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 cannot parse certain types of ISO8601 dates correctly and Google Chrome does not track the system’s time zone correctly. ...

In today’s post I’ll cover some of the potential use cases for AWS DynamoDB, why you might want to use it or not. ...

Today’s post one covers one approach for displaying the correct timezone adjusted date and time in a web application. A common example for the problem being addressed is user A located in London, UK uploads a file to a central server located in New York City, US and then user B located in Seoul, SK views the file. When user B attempts to download the file we would like show the user when the file was uploaded in his or her current time zone. ...

A quick tip post on using Knockoutjs to create a certain type of common web UI component. The short and sweet summary is that I’ll show how to create a shuttle control using two select boxes that are bound to arrays of Javascript objects (instead of simple value types) using Knockoutjs. Before getting to that though I’ll provide some background on the various component used to create the UI. ...