Today Apple released the new Macbook and Macbook Pro lines of laptops. They are nice, but seem to miss something fundamental for anyone sitting for more than 5 minutes looking at their laptops: matte screens.

Our friends over at Topicus do some serious Extreme Programming:

Very nice!

Via Martijn Dashorst

After some years with Eclipse, circumstances led me to try IntelliJ. It’s now six months later. After this period, I can only conclude that both IntelliJ and Eclipse are very capable IDE’s. In this post I look back at some features I loved in Eclipse, but are missing in IntelliJ. What is your experience with IDE’s?
Which features are absolutely essential for you?

Last week I did some refactoring of our software. Moving some classes, renaming some methods – the basic stuff. Easy and fast with those newfangled IDE’s we have nowadays. A few days later, I ran in some other classes that I somehow forgot to refactor. How did that happen?

I think it’s the IDE. Sometimes refactoring is too easy. Moving stuff around is no problem anymore. You can do it fast and painless. Almost without thinking.

Moving files around happens in background processes. Related files that are very near on the filesystem, are almost invisible while refactoring in an IDE. This sometimes gives me funny classes, odd packages and weird structures in my project.

Even when it’s easy, you have to keep thinking!

In reaction to: Don’t Go Dark. (Jeff, your comment submission form is not working… working again!)

Excerpt from the article

“Don’t go dark. Hiding your code until it’s “done” may feel safer, but it isn’t. Sharing your code with your coworkers is scary, much less the world — but it also results in feedback and communication that will improve your code and draw you closer to the project you’re working on. And isn’t that why we all write code in the first place?”

Reaction

Communication is the most important aspect of every project, open source or not. Providing code is a very nice form of communication, because it exactly describes what you were thinking. A big blob of code hides this communication effort and makes it less effective. Communicate early, communicate often.

Another beast: continuous integration. How to cope with the changes your teammates are doing while you are ‘in the dark’? You keep synchronizing your local tree more than you’d want to. With a fast-moving project, it sucks all your valuable coding time to just keep up with all changes.

Share your code with your team mates, really.