Earlier last week, my team and I attended the thinkproject! group technology summit. Taking place in Berlin during November 13 to 15, this event focussed on getting technical teams throughout the whole group together, getting people to know each other and helping strong teams getting started building great products together in a collaborative way. As a tech team and a company, we’ve been into this since 2011 so such an event possibly was extremely overdue, and in the end, for a first attempt, it worked out pretty well…
thoughts
GNOME: 18 and moving
Well, what do you know: The GNOME Unix desktop project is about to celebrate its 18th ‘birthday’, anniversary, … by tomorrow, August 15, 2015. I guess there’s more interesting news these days, and I also just noticed while incidentially stumbling across the GNOME web site earlier this morning…
Zweieinhalb mal zehn.
Zweieinhalb Jahrzehnte… Eine der großen runden Zahlen, die das ganze Jahr schon dominiert. Und dazu Bilder, Momentaufnahmen, Videos. Kerzen und Menschen auf der Straße. Ein überfüllter Botschaftsgarten. Züge von Prag über Dresden gen Westen. Menschen, die auf der Mauer tanzen und dies Wochen zuvor vermutlich noch nicht zu ahnen gewagt hätten. Vermutlich sind wir, die wir zwischen Mitte und Ende der 1970er in der DDR geboren sind, eine Art Brückengeneration im Blick auf die Umbrüche des Jahres 1989: Wir sind alt genug, um noch vage zu wissen, wie es sich anfühlt, aufzuwachsen zwischen zwei Systemen, die sich unversöhnlich gegenüberstehen in einer scharf geteilten Welt, auf einem scharf geteilten Kontinent, in einem Land unmittelbar an dieser Teilung, an einer harten, gnadenlosen, militarisierten, eigentlich unüberwindbaren Grenze. Wir sind alt genug, um aus der Schule noch dunkel Begriffe und Denkmuster aus dieser Zeit einordnen zu können. Aber wir sind auch jung genug, um damals, im Herbst 1989, nahezu alle relevanten Entscheidungen im Leben – Schule, Ausbildung, Lebensentwurf, Liebe – noch fast komplett vor uns zu haben. Wir sind jung genug, um bis dahin noch nicht wirklich richtig in Konflikt mit dem herrschenden System gekommen zu sein, um Einschränkungen wie Reise-, Meinungs- und Pressefreiheit wirklich als ernstlich und schwerwiegend wahrgenommen zu haben. Wir wurden in gewisser Weise “frei”, von einen Tag auf den anderen, vermutlich ohne zuvor wirklich viel Unfreiheit empfunden zu haben…
Jetty, Micro Services and re-shaping things.
Last week, the Java part of our system went productive after a major runtime update – and it did so not on top of the Glassfish application server we’ve been using so far but rather re-structured into multiple modules embedding a current version of Eclipse Jetty. This is a fairly large change and quite a step, still sort of a work in progress and, after all, once again something worth writing a bit more about…
instagram on Android. And now?
So, here it is. After being highly anticipated for quite a while, the instagram folks a few days ago finally launched an Android version of their imaging / photosharing app so far only available for Apples iOS platform. As I am pretty much into using my Android phone for imaging, too, I couldn’t help having … Read more instagram on Android. And now?
a better mousetrap #4: integrating on top of CouchDB
I’ve recently been writing about Apache CouchDB and its various features of interest in our environment, and I will continue doing so as, after working with this platform, I came across a bunch of thoughts I quickly felt like pinning down, either in order to remember them, or in order to eventually have some discussion on that topic as I still consider myself learner as far as both CouchDB and architecture on top of CouchDB is concerned.
Read morea better mousetrap #4: integrating on top of CouchDB
a better mousetrap #2: RESTing HATEOAS
Eventually a rather short thought relating to my attempt trying to, well, build a better mouse trap. Maybe in course of exploring things and slowly growing a technical environment into something new, there’s always the chance of discovering a show-stopper to immediately prove a given approach limited or even wrong altogether, but at the moment, I am pretty much entertained by following HATEOAS and HTTP ‘ideas’ for building an (external, internal, whatever) system interface all anew. Why?
a clueless start to node.js
node.js is a technology that has been on my “to-try” stack of technologies for quite a while now. There has been quite some fuzz out there recently regarding this framework, and as so far I wanted to have a closer look on what’s possible in JavaScript outside the browser, anyway, it seemed a good reason for dealing with something “new” just for the sake of it, even without immediately having any meaningful use cases at hand… Read on. 🙂
modeling, technologies and culture
Looking back at yesterdays Dresden Eclipse Indigo demo camp, I ended up with a couple of thoughts in my mind, both related to the technologies demonstrated there, and related to how to make meaningful use of them in a real-world environment. Overally, this demo camp event mainly was dominated by topics related to modeling tools and concepts on top of Eclipse technology – hardly a surprise knowing that itemis, the company behind tools such as XText, also appeared as main sponsor and organizer of this evening. Consequently, XText also appeared on the agenda in its latest EMFText and how to easily build (or, better, “have around”) an Eclipse integrated debugger for EMFText based domain specific languages at no additional costs. Running a DSL interpreter and doing debugging just the way you’d do it in Java code surely is an interesting experience. Not even talking all too much about ProR integrated with XText for the purpose of capturing requirements in a somewhat formal way. In some situations, this is just what you want or need, and problems to eventually be solved by using these tools are obvious almost immediately…