Closures in Java are a hot topic of late. A few really smart people are drafting a proposal to add closures to a future version of the language. However, the proposed syntax and the linguistic addition are getting a lot of push back from many Java programmers. Today, Elliotte Rusty Harold posted his doubts about the merits of closures in Java. Specifically, he asks "Why Hate the for Loop?": I don’t know what it is some people have against for loops that they’re so eager to get rid of them. This isn’t the first or even the second time CS theorists have revolted against ...

As a freelance web developer, I’ve seen and used my fair share of open source web applications (and desktop software), and I’d like to point out something that I see all too often in open source projects: the user interface almost always lets the project down. Let me explain…The ProblemI’ve used a considerable amount of open source software (web-based and desktop), and I feel that a large portion of them are let down by their UI. The functionality is brilliant, the code is great, and the product is useful, but the user interface often just lacks the smoothness and le...

A friendly reminder:The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem. –Steven PressfieldSome stuff is just hard.We start thinking we messed up. That it’s an issue with us. But it’s not. The work is hard and the problem is hard. You need to solve the problem, not fix yourself.The quote above is from Steven Pressfield’s incredible Do the Work. The audiobook (that’s a store link) is about 90 minutes long, so it fits in a single dreary London commute and costs less than lunch.My problem as of lateMy previous businesses have b...

Client-side analytics is broken. The numbers produced by it are trivially spoofable by competitors and nefarious characters. Most websites use client-side analytics of one type or another and the only way to get numbers you can trust is to compare numbers from multiple providers and to take an average of the closest two.This post highlights the problem and proposes a partial solution that substantially mitigates the issues with minimal effort. Our proposed solution is simply to include a digital signature in each message sent to the analytics provider. Apart from the server-side generatio...