Martin Fowlers discusses the term Technical Debt as what is introduced into your code when you take a quick, yet messy approach to developing something. Another way to think about technical debt is as the inverse of quality; in other words:
technical debt = 1 / quality
A word that I’ve often heard used to describe the action of incurring technical debt is sprinting (not to be confused with a sprint in Scrum). This is an analogy to sprint running (in the track-and-field sense) where developers are rushing to write code, often …

I’ve often felt that there should be an etiquette guide for pair programming. Here is a first stab. I’ll update this list as I think of more.
Navigator:

Wait until the test is passing to nitpick on coding standards.
Ask nicely for the keyboard to “show” what you mean.
After “showing” what you mean, offer the keyboard back.
If they don’t take your advice, let them finish doing the task their way and then show them after they’re done.
It is good to inform the driver of keyboard shortcuts and refactorings but don’t interrupt the programming …

I somehow got suckered into going to a multi-level-marketing (MLM) meeting not too long ago. No, not Amway… BurnLounge. Burnlounge is an MLM scheme where you pay around $500 to start your own music store in order to sell to your friends and family. Burnlounge allows you to customize your own front page and provides you with a URL like:
http://burnlounge.com/yourMusicStoreNameGoesHere
When your friends and family go to your Website, they can buy music from you for the great price of…. drumroll… $0.99 a pop. The music selection and prices are all …

I just read that Universal Music is suing MySpace.com over copyright violation, saying that MySpace encourages its users to illegally distribute copyrighted materials. Universal is arguing that:
“Our music and videos play a key role in building the communities that have created hundreds of millions of dollars of value for the owners of MySpace,” the company said in a statement. “Our goal is not to inhibit the creation of these communities, but to ensure that our rights and those of our artists are recognized.”
Yes, and MySpace, through its “copyright violation” has …

Since Java adopted annotations, I’ve heard a lot of discussion around whether to prefer annotations over external configuration files (often XML) and vice versa.
I think the decision boils down to two criteria:
1) Can annotations simplify the metadata?2) Can changes to the metadata break behavior in your application?
If annotations do not reduce the amount of metadata that you have to provide (in most cases they do), then you shouldn’t use annotation.
I think the more important thing to considered is whether a configuration change could break behavior or not. If not, then …