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Part two of Getting Things Done: dig into the GTD workflow — collecting, processing, organising, reviewing, and doing.

An introduction to Getting Things Done (GTD) — David Allen's system for stress-free productivity.

What candidates can expect from a pair programming interview test.

Understand the difference between URL encoding and form encoding (x-www-form-urlencoded) and how to correctly encode HTTP request parameters in Java.

A simple introduction to HTTP and REST.

Stop overlooking JUnit's @Rule annotation.

Scala as a functional/OO hybrid: what does 'functional' really mean?

Exception handling in Scala: from familiar try/catch with pattern matching to functional approaches using Either and Option types.

Design better exceptions by treating them as proper objects with behaviour.

Treat exception handling as a system-wide concern.

Replace the try-fail-catch anti-pattern with JUnit's ExpectedException rule for cleaner, more readable exception testing.

Introducing robotooling: a collection of open-source Java utilities capturing reusable patterns around HTTP, Excel, Concordion, and concurrent testing.

Fix IE8 prompting to download JSON responses from Jersey REST services by setting the correct Content-Type and response headers.

Apply hexagonal (ports and adapters) architecture to structure acceptance tests.

Avoid declarative transaction management frameworks like Spring.

How to get Java source code on your Mac for IDE source attachment.

Reflecting on the last few years of heavily interviewing for agile developers.

How to catch multiple exceptions, process them independently, then rethrow them all.

Make assertions against Log4J in tests using a custom appender.

My article 'Java the language vs Java the platform' published in the Java Tech Journal.

tempus-fugit 1.1 released.

A preview of noteworthy Java 7 features: diamond operator, try-with-resources, switch on strings, and the foundation they lay for Java 8 lambdas.

Logging clutters code and couples concerns.

Practical tips for more honest and effective pair programming in agile teams.

What's the difference between a lambda and a closure?

Use a competency depth distribution chart to visualise your team's skills and identify gaps.

Choosing the right level of testing — unit, integration, or acceptance — is a subtle skill.

Generate a Concordion test overview page automatically using the Concordion Ant Task.

Put the YOU into your objectives.

Almost all unmarshalling frameworks impose constraints on your application.

Compare setter injection vs constructor injection in Java.

Wrapping checked exceptions to rethrow as RuntimeExceptions is verbose boilerplate.

A concrete deadlock example in Java showing how two threads can deadlock acquiring the same locks in opposite orders.

Java insists enum annotation values must be enum constants, preventing type-safe runtime checks.

Run JUnit tests concurrently using tempus-fugit's @RunWith(ConcurrentTestRunner.class).

Automatically repeat intermittently failing tests using tempus-fugit's @Intermittent JUnit rule.

Detect Java deadlocks programmatically using the DeadlockDetector from tempus-fugit.

Java's Thread class does not maintain thread state atomically with its interrupt status flag, leading to subtle race conditions in state checking.

Announcing tempus-fugit 1.0, a Java library for testing concurrent and time-sensitive code.

Thawte is discontinuing free personal email certificates and web of trust.

Set up performance monitoring early.

Getting Java source code on Mac OS X — Apple's Java distribution quirks and how to access JDK source for IDE integration.

Java's ReentrantReadWriteLock allows concurrent reads but serialised writes.

Is instanceof really a code smell?

The Executors framework can convert Runnable to Callable but not the reverse.

An experience report comparing SWTBot and Window Licker for GUI testing.

Allocating less heap size to the JVM actually means you can create more native threads.

Java struggles with type inference when multiple generics are in play.

Another micro-DSL example: a fluent find-in-list API.

Java's Stack class extends Vector, making it not a true stack.