Author Archives: Emil Sit

Understanding SpringSource and the Spring Framework

In light of recent announcements like vmForce or the SpringSource/Google App Engine integration, you may be wondering, what the Spring Framework is, precisely. What does the SpringSource company provide?

According to their homepage, SpringSource is in the business of “eliminating enterprise Java complexity” and is a leader in Java application infrastructure and management. That’s [...]

Examining your personal programming style

When I was growing up, we would listen to classical music stations in the car and try to figure out the composer and sometimes even the performer. Both musicians and composers often have their own distinctive style: you can hear the mathematical precision of Gould, or the clarity of Horowitz, whether they are interpreting [...]

Music education versus computer science education

My mother recently forwarded me this interview of the pianist Glenn Gould:

I encourage you to watch this (and all 6 parts), even if you know nothing about classical music.

What stood out to me in viewing this series of videos was the fluidity with which Gould is able to discuss a piece of music, in its [...]

Repeated and Reproducible Systems Research

Daniel Lemire (@lemire) recently posted on the Mythical Reproducibility of Science, noting that sharing code also makes it easier to spread your ideas:

The reproducibility that matters is getting people to use your ideas. Merely proving you are honest falls short of your potential!

He’s also written on this in the past with statistics on [...]

Interview non-questions

Once you get a job at a company, you move from one side of the interview table to the other. My ideal candidate for just about any engineering position:

has the ability to present technical ideas on the fly; has practical Unix knowledge; can write clearly and concisely in English and in code; has a strong technical background.

Knowledge [...]

Getting started with Git

Because of our work with the Linux kernel and with Android, we have started using Git more extensively at work, and my colleagues often have questions about how to get things done with Git. While the every-day command lists are helpful, most of the time, people would benefit more from getting a fundamental understanding [...]

StackOverflow DevDays Boston 2009, Afternoon

The afternoon of Boston DevDays 2009 was, in my opinion, not as broadly appealing as the morning sessions (see my writeup of the morning here). However, there was still a lot of interesting material presented.

Joel welcomed us back from lunch by plugging StackExchange and how it’ll mean the end of “crappy old copies of Usenet” (by [...]

StackOverflow DevDays Boston 2009, Morning

Boston DevDays kicked off a month-long tour of technical talks aimed at programmers, organized by StackOverflow and Carsonified. I had the good fortune to attend, meet a few interesting people and see some fun talks. I tried to write a bit in real-time (search Twitter here) but the WiFi was pretty over-subscribed and there was no cell coverage to speak [...]