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Thank you all for attending my Devoxx UK 2013 presentation earlier today: Test-Driven Development with Java EE 7, Arquillian and Embedded Containers. It was a total honour to be at the first United Kingdom franchise. I am very proud to have served the community. Here is the Slidedeck for the talk: Devoxx UK 2013 Test-Driven […]

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I have called this piece: Can’t Change, Won’t Change. It is about what I found in recent years working in the financial services industry, in particular inside investment banking. I witnessed Agile adoption inside these organisations. Sad to say, it did not happen. Instead, lip service was paid to say SCRUM, for example. A lot […]

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This is a post for new developers, young, inexperienced or old and retraining into information technology. Recently, I had a discussion with many engineers at one of those many London user group nights about how there is so much new stuff that we have to explain to people new to programming. One person had to […]

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On Monday 19th November 2012, in the evening, I interviewed for the final episode of the Nighthacking tour by Stephen Chin, who is an Oracle Evangelist for Java, Chairperson of the JavaOne Program committee, and also a Java Champion a.k.a @steveonjava. We talked about ScalaFX the open source Domain Specific Language and Scala library framework for […]

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Here is how I build the OpenJFX 2.2 on both Mac OS X, because the semi-official Getting Started instructions on the OpenJFX site are a bit of out-of-date. Find a folder for your project, create a folder:- Using Mercurial, clone the project folder from the Master change-set: Copy the existing JavaFX runtime JAR into a […]

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After the exertions of JavaOne 2012, I was very glad of the relative warmth, wide-range green, autumn plucky country-side feel of Los Altos Hill. On Saturday, 6th October and partially Sunday 7th I was down at Foot Hill College for another dose of the Silicon Valley Code Camp. For people in Silicon Valley, a weekend […]

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The Conference Key Report Part 1 Report Part 2 Report Part 3: Analysis & Conclusions This year’s conference, in my opinion, was the best that Oracle have produced in the three years that it has taken over the stewardship of Java. It was great for technical content. The positives were that similar sessions were arranged […]

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The Silicon Valley Code Camp is a free event organised Peter Kellner and others every year in October. The SVCC talkes place at Foot Hill College, Los Altos Hills, California. It is now in its seventh edition, which in my opinion extraordinary. This years unofficial attendance was about 3800 participants, over range of technologies. It […]

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Here is a complete verbatim build.sbt for ScalaFX that works on MacOS X Lion and Java SE 7 Update 5: Java 7 up to Update 5 already includes JavaFX 2.1. Therefore there is no need to explicitly install in the jfxrt.jar inside a Maven directory. However, I am unsure how to link ScalaFX with JavaFX […]

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How do you get custom ordering in a Scala TreeMap? Well this puzzled me for a while. The answer lies in the world of implicits and receiver type converters. In a nut shell, a scala.collection.immutable.TreeMap is a SortedMap. If you look at the documentation for TreeMap, you will see it takes an Ordering[T] as an […]

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  The last day of QCon, Friday, had already started with a keynote, Resilient Response in Complex System, John Allspaw. The general advice was concentrate on recovery rather than attempting to avoid failure. The talk emphasized the need to train developers and operators in failure situation, following the model of military or emergency services. The […]

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About seven weeks ago now [Editor: 15 January 2012], I walked into to the office of IB Boost Limited. I surprised myself at the end of my journey. It was a new challenge and I was looking forward to it. When I left Lloyds Banking Group twelve months earlier or so, I knew that was […]