Look no further than last night's Spring Dallas User's group meeting for indication of how deeply Spring has cut into the mindspace of java enterprise programmers.

Spring Rivals Java Enterprise In Developer Interest ?

This is a "special interest group" for the java community in Dallas, and last night was almost as large an attendance as some of our JavaMUG meetings.

JavaMUG is a hugely successful, well attended, and long lived user group, so this should not be ignored by anyone who is planning projects over the next decade, Spring really does rival enterprise java at this point

Neal Ford came to JavaMUG this week to a packed crowd of 65 developers. The big story for me was his un-expected comments about IBM's product line.

I got a lot of helpful coding tips, for example something we don't always hear in talks at our user's group - a caution against "Ancticipatory Design" where you don't try to design around any anticipated needs until they actually show up. Being a more seasoned veteran than 28 years ago when I started, I'm willing to admit how true that actually is, even if I never thought about it much before.

Top Ten Tips Includes Dark Humor About WSAD ?

Neal's comments are always colorful, but number one on his Top 10 Corporate Code Smells is "There is a reason WSAD isn't called WHAPPY".

Last week was my fourth week here at Genuitec, and they are still saying things like "I'm sure you've done [* one or another practice *] at other places you've been."

Well, I haven't. Not like this anyway.

Sun's Gregg Sporar presented at JavaMUG tonight on memory leaks. We had a really good crowd, about 58 people.

The biggest thing I picked up from the presentation is why there would ever even be any memory leaks - because I would never write any in my programs, of course. So I had to learn how others might write leaks that I would be asked to fix. :)  Never lie, either, except in this blog.

Sharp Programmers Like To Kick Butt

When you are working around sharp programmers, one of the biggest challenges can be staying out of their way.

What is even more counter-intuitive is that staying out of their way can mean challenging them to the maximum, and seeing to it that they stay challenged on a consistent basis.

Never realized until this week, how much harder that makes a manager's job.

TVOM: Time Value of Money

TVOM is the elephant in the living room of software development.

Tool vendors create Value expressed as Time, and then comes their own tradeoff - a sucking sound that is supposed to be music to the developer's ears. If only that tradeoff was really music.

Decided On Ivy Instead Of Maven

Spent the last couple of days trying to set up an implementation of ant's ivy. This team is going to ant, but no way will they move to maven. So Ivy is the natural companion, I figured.

OK, couple of days is an exaggeration. I spent the last couple of days studying and reading all about it between interruptions, either way it took all my available extra time.

If a developer considered sales as part of his job, it might alter the process quite a bit.. My current boss says he considers me "a change agent" which is a fancy term for a "pain in the butt", far as I can tell. "You're not going to propose that we use groovy or grails or maven again, are you ?"

A new technology, on my current assignment, is defined as anything that came on the scene after 1999, far as I can tell. Ant is a new technology, for example. :(

Managing developers is an art, just ask anyone who ever had to manage me before. I cringe at the thought.

Much is on instinct, sure. Some is just calibration, keeping an eye and ear out for things that people do or say, even their eye and body movements if you are into that stuff. But this is quite different when the person is remote and you may never see them face to face, even for several years working closely together.

I used to be in an industry where results mattered, but that was only because the customer already knew what he wanted. This was 20 years ago, and I built physical things-  software was just something I wrote to support the real work.

Defining Terms: "Results Matter"  in this usage means that I am expected to perform against a clearly defined and understood performance benchmark. Type "abc" tile costs $4 a foot to get installed, that kind of thing.