What is the difference, and should we care? — When speaking about dependencies, both terms can be used, sometimes in a (dangerous) interchangeable way. Is React a framework or a library? What about Bootstrap, or Lodash? Both are “packages” after all, right? Sure thing, but they definitely not have the same impact on your app. Libraries A library (“bibliothèque” in…

Good naming means good design — Naming is one of the most important aspects of programming. It is also one of the most overseen aspect of it (i.e. “let’s make it work with a ‘x’ variable, we’ll choose a better name later”). Maybe this is because there is a distorted conception of programming. What is programming? A common definition…

You don’t want to do that — I should make clear that I made all those mistakes myself at least once, and still do a few of them every once in a while. Not because I am a developer, but because I am human: nobody likes to do some tedious things, nobody likes problems to fix, nobody…

Even developers can’t understand it — A few months ago I wrote an article mentioning the sad rejection of CSS by developers. There are several reasons for that, such as the difficulty to find good tutorials for beginners, but let’s face it: the primary reason for all that is the difficulty to understand the language itself. …

A few years ago, I started prototyping UFO@home, a visual testimony tool inspired by works of Roger Shepard, Richard Haines and motivated by Pierre Lagrange with the aim of improving UFO reporting. As I explained in another post, the benefit of such a tool was also, to me, to allow simulating known phenomena hypothesis (astronomical, balloons, meteors, planes, birds…) in order to validate or exclude them, along with agreement of the witness. Once the prototype done, I needed to produce the most realistic sky rendering as possible. This required re-writing (then, later, extend with ufology features) the state-of-the-art planetarium software, known as Stellarium. Then Stellarium for Java (S4J) was born.

At JavaOne, all sessions were subject to evaluations by the audience. Java Cards hanging on the neck of every people entering the conference room implicitly identified and counted them, while staff members at the entrance were giving evaluation forms to be fillled. The goal: evaluate our presentation, us as speakers, the quality of our slides, of the demos, etc. So how did it went for S4J? — This post was initially written in french, on June 6th 2008

Back from San Francisco where I was invited to the JavaOne 2008 event, I am still suffering a bit from the jet lag (8 hours is a thing). While being already a fun time for any Java developers (dozens of sessions about a wire range of topics, from detection chip to 3D on mobile phones, including Mars cartography, but also products of course — WorldWind, GlassFish, OpenSolaris… — APIs — OSGi, WebBeans, DarkStar, etc. —and other more general sessions), this was a much more important event to me, as I was expected to showcase Stellarium for Java with my co-developer, Frederic Simon. The result have been beyond all of our expectations. But, speaking of it, how does a “speaker” week look like at JavaOne?

Understanding recruiters habits — Two decades ago, recruitment was really an expert job. It required significant searching and identification skills, and only few people were able to do it. Actually candidates were so seldom contacted that they were happy to receive a call. Then came the “Internet bubble” with everybody looking for tech talents…

Set them free, always — Resources (connections, files, memory) are typically non-shared objects. Two clients cannot write in the same file or memory area at the same time or perform concurrent transactions on the same connection. This is a matter of consistency, as concurrent writes may result in lost updates, and even concurrent write vs…