Dustin Marx: Significant Software Development Developments of 2012 - Groovy 2.0 with static typing, rise of Git[Hub], NoSQL, mobile development (iOS etc.), Scala and Typesafe stack 2.0, big data, HTML5, security (Java issues etc.), cloud, DevOps.
20 Kick-ass programming quotes - including Bill Gates' "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.", B.W. Kernighan's "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.", Martin Golding's "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." (my favorite)
How to Have a Year that Matters (via @gbrindusa) - do you want to just survive and collect possessions or do you want to make a difference? Some questions everybody should pose to him/herself.
Expression Language Injection - security defect in applications using JSP EL that can sometimes leads to double evaluation of the expressions and thus makes it possible to execute data supplied by the user in request parameters etc. as expressions, affects e.g. unpatched Spring 2.x and 3.
Languages etc.
HN discussion about Scala 2.10 - compilation speed and whether it matters, comparison of the speed and type system with Haskell and OCaml, problems with incremental compilation (dependency cycles, fragile base class), some speed up tips such as factoring out subprojects, the pros and cons of implicits etc.
Neal Ford: Functional thinking: Why functional programming is on the rise - Why you should care about functional programming, even if you don't plan to change languages any time soon - N. Ford explains the advantages of FP and why FP concepts are spreading into other languages (higher abstractions enabling focus on the results over steps and ceding control to the language, more reusability on a finer level (higher-order functions etc.), few generic data structures with many operations -> better composability, "new" and different tool such as lazy collections, shaping the language towards the problem instead of vice versa, aligning with trends such as immutability)
How to Completely Fail at BDD - a story of an enthusiastic developer who tried to make everyone's life better by introducing automated BDD tests and failed due to differences in culture (and inability to change thinking from the traditional testing), a surprising lack of interest in the tool and learning how to write good tests: "Culturally, my current team just isn’t ready or interested in something like this." Morale: It is hard to change people, good ideas are not enough.
M. Feathers: Refactoring is Sloppy - refactoring is often prioritized out of regular development and refactoring sprints/stories aren't popular due to past failures etc. An counter-intuitive way to get refactoring in is to imagine, during planning, what the code would need to be like to make it easy to implement a story. Then create a task for making it so before the story itself and assign it to somebody else then the story (to force a degree of scrutiny and communication). "Like anything else in process, this is medicine. It's not meant to be 'the way that people do things for all time' [..]" - i.e. intended for use when you can't fit refactoring in otherwise. It may also make the cost of the current bad code more visible. Read also the commits (f.ex. the mikado method case).
Cyber-dojo: A great way to practice TDD together. Compare your read-green cycle and development over time with other teams. Purposefully minimalistic editor, a number of prepared tdd tasks.
On the Dark Side of "Craftsmanship" - an interesting and provoking article. Some developers, the software labouers, want to get work done and go home, they haven't the motivation and energy to continualy spend time improving themselves. There is nothing wrong with that and we shouldn't disparge them because of that. We shouldn't divide people into craftsmen and the bad ones. A summary of and response to the varied reactions follows up in More on "Craftsmanship". The author is right that we can't expect everybody to spend nights improving her/his programming skills. Still they should not produce code of poor quality (with few exceptions) since maintaining such code costs a lot. There should be time for enough quality in a 9-5 day and people should be provided with enough guidance and education to be able to write decent code. (Though I'm not sure how feasible it is, how much effort it takes to become an acceptable developer.) Does the increased cost of writing (an learning to write) good code overweight the cost of working with bad code? That is an eternal discussion.
Cloud, web, big data etc.
Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics (via Leon) - a very reasonable argument against real-time analytics: yes, we want real-time operational metrics but "analytics" only makes sense on a sensible amount of data (for the sake of statistical significance etc.) RT analytics could easily provide misguided results.
CAP Twelve Years Later: How the "Rules" Have Changed (tl;dr, via @_dagi) - an in-depth discussion of the CAP theorem and the simplification (2 out of 3) that it makes; there are many more nuances. By Eric Brewer, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and vice president of infrastructure at Google.
ROCA: Resource-oriented Client Architecture - "A collection of simple recommendations for decent Web application frontends." Server-side: true REST, no session state, working back/refresh etc. Client: semantic HTML independent of layout, progressive enhancement (usable with older browsers), usable without JS (all logic on the server) etc. Certainly not suitable for all types of apps but worthwile to consider the principles and compare them with your needs.
Vaurien, the Chaos TCP Proxy (via @bsvingen) - an extensible proxy that you can control from your tests to simulate network failure or problems such as delays on 20% of the requests; great for testing how an application behaves when facing failures or difficulties with its dependencies. It supports the protocols tcp, http, redis, memcache.
Wvanbergen's request-log-analyzer for Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Rails and more (via Zarko) - generates a performance report from a supported access log to point out requests that might need optimizing