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John Shepard, one of our architects, blogged some interesting thoughts on what makes a document inspection. Most developers will tell you that code reviews are good, and also tell you they aren’t done regularly in their organization. But John goes beyond the scope of code to reviewing other documents such as requirements and technical specifications as well. “While there is an ongoing debate on whether or not document inspections are useful, my experience is that on larger projects, they are…

I like Gmail but it has a big short coming: you can’t sort mail by attachment size. This means that if you are running out of space in your Gmail account, you can’t easily find large attachments like that 25MB video that your friend sent you of his kid’s graduation or other large attachment that you really would like to get rid of. There are sites like findbigmail.com that will help you find large attachments, but the downside is that…

Chariot architect Anatoly Polinsky has created an interactive Prezi presentation about the power of Spring Batch. It is an animated blog post because Anatoly is not just a software developer, he’s an artist. It is a cool way to get familiar with what Spring Batch does for you and a lot of fun to watch. http://prezi.com/6mnfrgjuh3dp/the-ultimate-power-of-spring-batch/

I spent a fair amount of time developing actor-based systems recently, specifically with the Scala Actor library. Regardless of whether you are implementing actors with the Scala library, Akka, Lift or Scalaz, some basic gotchas can present themselves until you get a feel for what you’re doing. Here are some of them that I’ve learned the hard way. Never Refer Directly to Other Actors Actors are fragile and can die easily. While you typically create a supervisor with a strategy…

John Shepard, one of Chariot’s architects and newest bloggers, just recently posted this on his blog. A little different from our more focused software dev posts, we hope you will find this information useful. I recently switched my work machine from OS X to Fedora. One of the first programs I noticed was missing was Time Machine. After being unable to get any of the backup software for Linux to behave as desired, a project emerged. Ignoring most of the details…