Our typical approach to problem-solving is to invent something new. If you've been around the block a few times, it gets harder to convince you to jump into yet another untested scheme.

I recently held an exploratory meeting with a potential new client where we needed to share a screen over the internet. Neither of us had used DimDim but it did the trick with no snags.

Guidance & inspiration vs. directing & controlling.

Relational databases offer a rich toolset to help ensure the integrity of data. Apart from normalized schema, however, few enterprise applications take advantage of those tools and, instead, tend to implement integrity checking inside application layers. If SQL database constraints are useful, why aren't more applications taking advantage of them?

At the JVM Languages Summit, Josh Bloch expressed his concern about what he called the "semantic gap" between the source code we write and its performance at runtime: As performance improves, our ability to predict the performance consequences of our source code degrades.

After a conversation with a guy at work, I was inspired to take a look at whether Scala is inherently more complex than Java, and decided it wasn't.

My coauthor James Ward was here last weekend and we managed to debug the screencasting process and produce 6 screencasts. On his next visit we plan to finish creating a screencast for each chapter in the book.

Can a focus on C++ get me through the next twenty-odd years? Is it time to stop chasing bright, shiny new languages and consolidate as a guru? A few thoughts on "legacy languages" and the later stages of a coding career.

The internet takes a formerly-expensive cost (communication) and drives it to essentially zero. Any activity where communication is important is being disrupted. To find out how much, drive the result as far to the extreme as possible.

Scala has an Option type that provides a type-safe alternative to using null to represent optional values. In this blog post, I show how to replace nested conditionals involving Option with a for-expression.

There's a saying that's been traveling the business circles in recent years: "Speaking truth to power." It means you are so confident and direct that you can actually tell someone in power what's really going on.

This is the updated translation of a beginner-level paper I wrote for Stacktrace one year ago (see http://stacktrace.it/articoli/2008/05/gestione-dei-record-python-1/). It basically discusses Python 2.6 namedtuples (plus some musing of mine).

A quick recipe for readers of digital comics

A recent paper by Gilles Dubochet describes a study that concluded Scala code written in a functional style that favors for expressions and higher order functions is easier to comprehend than Scala code written in a more Java-like, looping style. It also found that meaningful variable names were insigificant or even detrimental to comprehension.

My prediction of how Chrome -- both the browser and the OS -- is going to flatten the playing field for programmers.