Taking care of indoor plants can be work, especially if you have many of them. As you know water plays a major role in the health of plants, so lets automate it! Automation of watering plants can be cheap, fun and rewarding. Some quick history about plant watering and why...

If you have ever practiced test driven development (TDD), then you are probably familiar with the TDD mantra – red, green, refactor. I’m a big proponent of TDD, but I think the TDD mantra is missing a fourth step. In his book that introduced me to TDD, Test Driven Development:...

Starting in Spring Security 3.2, developers gained an easy solution to their Cross-Site Request Forgery problems with Spring’s implementation of the Synchronizer Token Pattern. Spring’s documentation does a great job of explaining Synchronizer Token Pattern and their implementation, so rather than talk about all of that, I’m going to show you...

I have found that Apache Camel is a good way to load data from log files into a database. Read on to see how I did this using the splitter and aggregator patterns with Apache Camel. Problem We have huge logging files for a project (months of system logging), the...

For years, like many of you, I have been comparing software development to construction. But ever since adopting the agile methodology a decade ago, I have been looking for a better analogy to help me explain agile software development. I recently came up with what I think is that analogy...

This article explains how to use SphinxSE, Sphinx real time indexing, and set up Sphinx in order to improve search query performance.   First some background about issues surrounding full-text search. Why does someone need a full text search engine? A MySql database with over a million records will take...

As a new employee here at Source Allies and a new user to our suite of Atlassian products, I was fortunate, and a little intimidated, to attend Atlassian’s 2013 Summit. Despite my initial trepidation, I left feeling inspired by what I learned. Inside the Team Summit 13 was all about...

I find that in software development, and also in life, people learn best within the context of painful experiences. I’m not suggesting that software development mentors go out of their way to create painful experiences for their teams. On the contrary, just start listening. It doesn’t take very long to identify...

I facilitated my own rendition of the #NoEstimates Puzzle Experiment for the September 2013 Agile Iowa user group meeting. This experiment was created by Chris Chapman to generate critical thinking and conversation concerning whether estimates are necessary to produce quality software. The meeting had a great turnout, with around 40...

Error handling is tricky. Not because it’s especially hard to do, but because everyone (operations, the business team, fellow programmers) seems to have a different idea of how a particular situation should be handled. A web service is down? No problem. You should try again every five seconds, but no...