Monthly Archives: February 2013

Survey Results: Are Developers More Productive In Scala?

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The Story So Far

Lots of numbers in different fonts and coloursAbout two weeks ago, I wrote a blog post suggesting that Scala can make Java developers more productive. One of the comments on that post was that I had no metrics and so was spreading “folklore”. I took the criticism constructively and decided to solicit a small survey of Scala developers to try and get some insight.

What I Wanted to Learn

One of the most important things I’ve read about Lean Startups – and it’s important because it can be applied to a gamut of contexts, not just startups – is that, while the execution of the Lean process is Build, Measure, Learn, you actually have to apply this backwards to get good results: first you decide what you want to learn, that will inform what you need to measure, and that will determine what you need to build.

I employed this advice with this survey, asking first: “What do I hope we learn from this”, and using that to inform the content. Here are the questions for which I wanted the survey to provide some insight: Continue reading →

Are You More Productive In Scala?

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JugglingUpdate: The survey has closed and you can have a look at the results here.

Yesterday I wrote a blog entitled ‘A New Java Library For Amazing Productivity‘, which was – in all honesty – a trap: a well-intentioned honey trap with the purpose of trying to convince developers that they should be looking at Scala and evaluating it on the merits of its potential to deliver productivity gains, just as they would with a library or framework, rather than discounting it because it’s a “language”.

One of the comments I received was from Stephan Schmidt who writes the ‘codemonkeyism’ blog. Stephan wrote:

The sad state of our industry: Folklore.

Huge claim: “A New Java Library for Amazing Productivity Posted on February 11, 2013″
No facts or numbers. Continue reading →

A New Java Library for Amazing Productivity

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I’ve found this great Java library that can make developers more efficient in pretty much every source file they write. It has the following features:

  • Ferrari 458 Italiaa broad and powerful collections framework
  • collection methods that greatly reduce boilerplate
  • immutable collections that don’t have mutation methods (unlike java.util classes where e.g. List.add() throws an exception if the list is immutable)
  • an awesome switch-like function that doesn’t just match numbers, enums, chars and strings, but can succinctly match all kinds of patterns in lots of different classes, even in your own classes
  • an annotation that automatically writes meaningful equals, hashCode and toString methods for classes whose fields don’t change (without using reflection) Continue reading →

What is DevOps? … in bullet points, quotes and tweets

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Interest in DevOps is booming. I feel like I heard it mentioned as the motivation for some decision at least once a week last year, and it climbed its way into the headlines of most of the newsletters I receive from LinkedIn, Twitter, InfoQ, etc.

Army soldiers pulling hard on a rope in a tug of war. Teams working together in a DevOps environment concentrate on all pulling together in the same direction.

I thought I understood it. It just means Dev and Ops collaborating closer, right? But as it gained more and more attention, I realised it must be a movement, not just a simple idea, so I set out to discover what DevOps was really about.

This blog is my summary of what I’ve learned from reading about DevOps over the last few months. There are heaps of resources and lots of people making great observations, so what I’ve done is try to distil lots of salient points into bullet-point format to make it easy for people to pick up as much as possible in a short read. Continue reading →