Feb 14-16, IBM's "Watson" is going to be playing Jeopardy.

Dick Wall's talk turns out to be a treasure trove of useful tidbits, and a great introduction to Scala that whets my appetite, big time.

An overview of upcoming features in Java.

A few weeks ago, I wondered if generics were going to be the death of Java. But today, I began to wonder if Oracle might just manage to do it in a lot more quickly.

This umbrella article encompasses newsworthy items gleaned from the show, with pointers to the content pieces.

In which I argue that (a) Generics have done egregious harm to both the elegance and readability of the Java language and, (b) they prove by example that static type checking is a linguistic dead-end. Are you persuaded? Do you agree? Read on...

I just read a good introduction to what is arguably the most important part of the agile development process, when it comes to quality. It does a good job of explaining that the real goal is not to “test” your code after you write it, but rather to create a “runnable specification” before you write it.

After being let go from Sun, I find that I can no longer get group messages, I can't connect to change my profile, and I can't contact them for help. In a word, I'm hosed. This post was the only remaining way to (hopefully) reach them.

A collection of miscellaneous observations and my "Best Of" awards.

Yesterday's post was about "why". Today's is about "how".

Why you want Rails for your web app, why you want JRuby on Rails for deployment, and why you want NetBeans for Rails development.

The need for a "Conference 2.0" format and a collection of JRuby notes.

A better hotel, collaboration tools, and development tools.

Sun provides a good opportunity for non-profits to network with prospective developers, and a hotel horror story.

In both Ruby and DITA, domain specific languages make elegance possible. More importantly, each is producing an ecosystem of domain specific languages (aka "power tools") that is making it more powerful as time goes on.