tfnico's blog

I think it's a shame how StackOverflow is jammed with old Q&A about how to do custom color themes for Eclipse. Thanks to  Felix  and his buddy Roger Dudler , there is now a far better way: Eclipse Color Theme plugin  and  www.eclipsecolorthemes.org . (Picture from  http://www.rogerdudler.com/?p=509 )

I think the dust has begun to settle around the certification debate . It seems to be that we've ended up at a kind of " Yes, CSM certification is silly, but it's a necessary evil. " attitude. I don't like this. Judging by the membership-ID on my ScrumAlliance profile page, I reckon I was one of the first few thousands to take the certification. I openly blogged about it at the time, I dare say with a hint of skepticism, and since then I've never really flaunted it (well, maybe now I am). I just saw a nice analogy for the CSM, paraphrasing Jon Kern : To filter out potential employees by checking their certification, is like seeking out race-car drivers by checking if they have a driver's license. I don't want to support this unwarranted prestige of being a CSM any more, so I've taken the notion of CSM out of my résumé , and I recommend everyone else to do the same. If I'm hiring, and you flag your CSM title, I'll rank it as brag...

Just a quick post to announce my new Google Guava page. My Guava blog post has gotten a relatively large amount of traffic, but the list of resources have gone a bit stale. In order to make the resources a bit more "time-agnostic", I've cleaned it up a little, and made it into it's own page: http://www.tfnico.com/presentations/google-guava

A typical misconception in Maven is that if you want to build a project in a special way, or parameterize it somehow, profiles are the thing for you. My opinion is that.. Profiles are POM smell. While I know they have their uses, I have abused profiles heavily in the past, and seen others do this too. What might start off as a simple little trick to get some desired build eventually leads to: One profile for each testing category (unit, database, web-tests, etc) (Hint: Use a test framework that supports grouping ) One profile for each environment/stage configuration (testing, live, etc) (Hint: Use a tool that supports  stage-aware configuration ) One profile for each artifact assembly (exclude module X when deploying in certain environments) The POM ends up awfully complicated, you get confusion around what kind of artifact is deployed where, and people start hating Maven because they forget -P parameters when they build, and end up rebuilding the whole project to change...