Recently Jnan Dash of Foldera made a great comment regarding persistence. He said there are two ways to park your car. The first is to disassemble it and store it on a shelf, then reassemble it when you need it again. Or just put it somewhere fully assembled.
One of the most powerful tools available in managing change and complexity is by sandboxing applications. This is simply achieved by reducing the number of external dependencies to an applications runtime environment, creating the most natural level of isolation as possible.
Since I seem to deal with a lot more XML documents than I would like, using JavaScript + E4X as a command line scripting language is a godsend. Below is an example on how to build a quick and dirty command line arguments parser.
I've put together a simple NetKernel module that tends to greatly simplify service and application development. mod-e4x provides helper functions allowing for rapid construction of services using the ECMAScript for XML syntax provided in the Rhino JavaScript interpreter. With mod-e4x, JavaScript becomes a viable alternative to the NetKernel DPML language.
Had a recent conversation with a Palo Alto stealth-mode startup member. Seems they want a flat organizational structure and thusly have hired 4 architects. I've had difficulty interesting developers in positions here unless they are offered an Architect title, even though they don't have more than 5 years professional experience.
If I'm writing code at work, I usually only have an hour or two at best to work on any given project. And that's pushing it. During one of these surgical coding strikes I was in need of a Java Tree container and came across the Data Structures Library in Java. Easy to grasp, simple to use, and much recommended.
Part of my staging environment is built on User Mode Linux. Even this website is hosted in a FreeBSD Jail. This of course allows many OS instances to run simultaneously on one machine.
