Hillyard's third law of programming

If you're trying to find a bug in your program and you just can't see it, ask a colleague for help. It's unlikely that the colleague will find the problem for you, but it's very likely that you will, as the process of explaining what you're trying to do invariably exposes the design flaw that your brain has hitherto been suppressing.

Hillyard's second law of programming

If you are looking for a bug in your program and you know that there is at least one "to-do" item that's related to the part of the code you think is responsible, fix the damn to-do. At least half of the time, it will solve your problem.

JSR-299 and Weld

Went to hear Gavin King (creator of Hibernate) last week at NEJUG. He was describing JSR-299 and the JBoss reference implementation (called Weld). OMG. Such fantastic stuff. I can rewrite Darwin to use it and get rid of all of those XML files – everything is done by annotations. Furthermore, there is a notion of life-cycle, as well as scope, for beans. Beautiful! And much more.

Here are Gavin's notes (hopefully, I'm not infringing any copyrights by posting this link).

Hillyard's first law of programming

If you're looking for a bug and you can't find the bug where you're looking, then you're looking in the wrong place! [Corollary to Holmes' law: when you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth]

Introduction

This blog is about software, generally speaking it will be Java-related. Sometimes there will be rants, other times reminders about the proper way to do things. Sometimes I might contribute something witty or useful.