A quick play around with the Java3D library and Groovy to see how much easier we can make the library to use.

Announcing the first public release of plac, a declarative command line arguments parser designed for simplicity and concision.

The EuroPython conference will be held in Birmingham UK, 19th to 22nd July 2010.

Your HR department may be very proud of their career planning publications but does the organisation actually benefit from forcing developers to consider their career?

This move has been several years in the making. My interests have been shifting during that time, away from software development and towards business. As several people have suggested, it makes sense to separate the two topics into different blogs.

An simple example of how easy it is to make a fairly powerful DSL using the dynamic features and powerful sytax of Groovy

A look at some of the core values espoused by SOA in Thomas Erl's fantastic "Service Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology and Design," 5 years later.

Pojomatic provides configurable implementations of the equals(Object), hashCode() and toString() methods inherited from java.lang.Object.

The problem is this: People come to Crested Butte (it's mostly tourism-based) and they can't find out what stores and services are available, or what's going on.

The Alpha 3 release of Heron 1.0 is now available for download from Google code. The completion of a couple of features, such as compile-time code reflection, and the inclusion of an editor, makes this one of the most interesting releases of Heron yet.

"... there's a gap between what science knows and what business does." This is the mantra that Dan Pink repeats throughout his book, describing how we unintentionally demotivate through our mistaken beliefs about how motivation works.

The most striking thing I heard was the number of people who said "I'll see you next year" to each other as they were leaving. This has become something more than a conference.

Tim Bray's WideFinder project is to write a simple log-file parsing program that runs fast on modern CPUs with low clock rates but many cores. I decided to tackle it with the newest Heron release (version 1.0 Alpha 2).

In 25 years or so, we'll look at the current morass as only a small step above assembly-language programming. Here's what I think programming will be like then.

Over five years ago I started talking about Heron on Artima.com. After several re-designs, and many side adventures, I am finally making the first Alpha release of version 1.0 of the Heron interpreter.