Lately I’ve been having a lot of blog ideas, but I never take the time to write it all down in a blogpost.
That’s why I’m now going to try to combine thing I love:

• Programming
• Technology
• Filming/video editing

Here is the first episode of Roy on programming:

Item 1: Oculus Rift
- http://www.oculusvr.com/
- http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/

Item 2: Rich Hickey
- http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
- http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Performance

Item 3: Separation of Concerns
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns

Music by:
- Nasty Goreng:

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Everybody seems to be using Fitnesse or Cucumber for integration testing these days. The main idea is that users (testers/business analists and programmers) can write what your program should do in plain text. The programmer then creates a small layer of code which gets interpreted and executes your actual program to see if the specified requirements are met.

Fitnesse example

For example a (hypothetical) piece of code in Fitnesse as it could have been used in the Port of Rotterdam:

Programmers need more ethics.
And I’m not talking about ‘craftsmanship’ ethics such as “always make clean code”, “be agile” or “coffee should be consumed pure and black”.

No, I’m talking about real ethics:

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

PRISM

Almost all the programmers I know are very active online, and all of them are condemning the US government project called PRISM. It is a huge electronic surveillance program, recently revealed by Edward Snowden....

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Last year I attended the first Devoxx4Kids in Gent (Belgium). It is a day where programmers introduce children aged 10 to 14 to programming. That day we used Scratch (a fun online programming framework), Lego Mindstorms and a Mars rover (with emulation). And it was a blast!

Once I returned and edited this video and showed it to my colleagues we quickly came to the conclusion: We need to organize a Dutch version!

Organizing

Edwin (a JPoint colleague) and I tried a couple of contacts and found a willing foe in the form of the University...

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We have a huge problem.

The knowledge gap

I’ve been a professional programmer now for over a decade, and during this time I’ve met a LOT of excellent programmers. Most of them are partially autodidactic and learned the business side of programming in school. But non of these guru’s/experts use their skills to teach the next generations. Sure, they attend programming conferences, give talks, join user groups etc. But all the other attendees are already good programmers! Companies usually send their brightest programmers to these conferences, not the beginning employees. This means there is already a gap in knowledge...

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At work we’ve had a lot of discussion about epics lately. We seem to have forgotten what they are and how we learned to deal with epics. It became a ‘theme’ or just a big pile of stories which sounded like they belong together. But epics are much much more.

An epic is a goal, and just one goal only. All the stories in the epic should contribute to that epic! Also the epics goal should be a business goal, never a technical goal. The epic should describe a SMART described measurable goal without hinting towards a (technical)...

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A couple of years ago, when our family was planning a trip to South Africa, I bought a nice DSLR. We had friends with excellent cameras, huge lenses and wild life photography experience. So instead of trying to compete with them I decided to buy a camera suited for filming. It was the rise of filming-DSLRs, and even television shows were adapting DSLRs for filming. I settled on a Canon 550D also known as Rebel T2i.

Just before I left for South Africa I decided to take the camera to the Devoxx 2011 conference. I didn’t even have a...

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Fitnesse

Fitnesse is a very popular test framework, used in a lot of projects. Using a wiki you describe the tests as plain text, which get translated into ‘fixtures’, code that is called that, in turn, can call your application. An example of a fixture we use:

|when the user logs in with username|roy               |and password   |test123   |
|and asks for the account details                                                 |
|ensure                             |displayed fullname|Roy van Rijn              |
|ensure                             |websites contains |http://www.royvanrijn.com/|
|ensure                             |websites contains |http://www.redcode.nl/    |

The corresponding Java code could be something like:

In the next couple of years dead will become an important aspect of the social networks. A time will come that most profiles on Facebook will belong to people who’ll never be able to post another update. Currently due to inactivity most dead profiles will be deleted or become inactive, but I think dead will take a much more important role on the internet.

My parents and even grandparents have a Facebook account now, but in twenty or thirty years, some people I’m connected to won’t be alive anymore. It would be great to be able to browse the lives...

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Yesterday when I returned home from another amazing Devoxx conference I quickly created another impression video:

A couple of weeks ago I went to Devoxx4Kids. Devoxx is a very well known Java conference (the best in the world actually!). This time they organized an event especially for kids ranging from 10 to 14 years old. The goal is twofold, the main goal is to just give them a good time, the second goal is to introduce them to programming and technology in a fun way.

To show the world this is a great idea, Stephan invited me to film the event and capture the happy faces of the kids enjoying themselfs. And now after Devoxx 2012,...

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Stacktraces in Java are wrong. This is a conclusion that I’ve drawn after years of working with novice programmers.

What is the first thing novice programmers do when they encounter a stacktrace? They start reading it, and this is wrong! The first thing you should do is scroll down. That is because the most important piece of the stacktrace is most likely at the bottom.

Caused by…

Stacktraces in Java are usually wrapped numerous times, because all the frameworks and the application server wants to add their own little bit of information around the original exception. The problem is...

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Yesterday a friend of mine pointed me to the following thread:
https://github.com/giving/giving.github.com/issues/11

giving.github.com

Giving.github is a project that tries to bring people together. There are a lot of programmers looking for fun projects in the world, and so are scientists/charities and other people with problems!

Be sure to check it out, maybe you can help somebody as well.

Mara-Naboisho Lion Project

One of the problems posted to giving.github has something to do with Lion collars. The Mara-Naboisho Lion Project has a couple of collars and some files, but no idea what...

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With the sudden surge of visitors from Reddit (Hello!) I decided to take look at Google Analytics. And two things caught my eye:

First of all, Google Analytics ‘Realtime’ is awesome, you can see minute by minute how many people are on your website and what they are looking at, where they come from (internetwise and geographically).

Last week I’ve created a ray marcher 3d engine which renders the Mandelbulb. And I’ve translated it into pure Javascript a couple of days later. After the translation I decided I should optimize the code a little for speed, so I made some speed improvements in the Javascript code. The main optimization was using an array for the vector3d instead of a class/function.

Rendering the Mandelbulb on a 400x400 canvas now took just 1850ms in Javascript (Chrome, V8). Which is very fast! Even faster than my Java implementation (running on Java 1.6.0.33 -server, which was faster than...

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