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Celebrating Eclipse’s 10th Birthday in Boston

Posted in About, Eclipse on November 9th, 2011 by Vineet SinhaBe the first to comment

Eclipse is turning 10 years – and we have been in a mood to celebrate it. We have been involved in a lot of Eclipse related events in the past, but wanted to do something special this year.

If you are in Boston, come join us next week. We will be having free pizza, beer and even a birthday cake. We will have a bunch of people who really know Eclipse inside-out and will be showcasing a bunch of the cool technology being built these days.

Time and Location: We have planned to have the event on 17 November 2011 at 6:30PM, at Constant Contact, (Reservoir Place, 1601 Trapelo Road, Waltham, MA 02451 – see on map).

Here’s what you’ll get to see in this month’s Eclipse Demo Day:

CodeMaps.org – by Architexa

Architexa will demonstrate CodeMaps, a site built to help developers to easily understand Open Source projects from their web browsers, and the result of the exploration can be documented and shared online.

Code Sight Code Search – by Black Duck

Black Duck will demonstrate Code Sight, a free code search tool developers can use for their everyday search needs. This short demonstration will include searching and filtering capabilities that make finding code easier.

Open Source Jenkins CI – by CloudBees

CloudBees will show you how to use open source Jenkins CI to leverage agile development. Additionally, you can manage your development work and projects – all from within the Eclipse IDE, using the free plugin provided by CloudBees!

Orion Demonstration – by Eclipse

Eclipse will give a short demonstration of Orion, an online editor that runs in the web browser using javascript. Unlike other attempts at creating browser-based development tools, this is not an IDE running in a single tab. Links work and can be shared.

Eclipse Apricot Project – byNuxeo

Nuxeo will present the Eclipse Apricot project and introduce how to develop content-centric applications with Apricot project and with the Nuxeo IDE Eclipse plugin.

 

If you want to hear more information, you can visit Eclipse Demo Day or contact Sarah at sgerrol@blackducksoftware.com.

You can register for the event at Eclipse DemoCamps November 2011/ Boston.

 

 

Making Code Easy to Understand – What Developers Want (a study)

Posted in Documentation & Communication, Understanding Developers, User Experience on July 27th, 2011 by Vineet Sinha10 Comments

What exactly makes a codebase easy to understand; the documentation or the tools that you use? In our effort to help developers who are working with large codebases, we conducted a survey (see details and highlights) to find out what techniques developers use to better understand code.
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A Detailed Study on Understanding Code

Posted in Agile & Development Methodologies, Documentation & Communication, Java on July 19th, 2011 by Vineet SinhaBe the first to comment

Let’s face it; code can be hard to understand. We have all encountered a piece of code that took longer than expected to figure out or was easy to misunderstand. It could be a new library, a coworker’s code, or your own code from 6 month’s ago.

In a previous post we discuss the importance of taking time to study users in order to get feedback on innovative ideas. We did that to determine how developers understand code and why it can be a challenge.

We asked Open Source developers a number of questions. Two that stood out were their thoughts on the difficulty of understanding their code and what they generally wanted more of in such projects.

The first question we asked Open source developers was if they thought that the code they were working on was challenging to understand. Those using the libraries (API Clients) had a different take than those building the library (Core developers).

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Making Cool Ideas Happen: Studying Our Users and Software Immigrants

Posted in Agile & Development Methodologies, Developer Tools, User Experience on February 3rd, 2011 by Vineet Sinha2 Comments

One of the nice things about being Software Developers, is that it’s really nice to spend our time working on cool ideas:  building out systems that help in situations where no solution currently exists. The problem is that often these cool ideas fail. Yes, using an Agile approach helps significantly, especially when customers/users request features. But often customers don’t realize what problems they need solved or what developers are capable of. Skilled engineers have the opportunity to really push the envelope with new and innovative ideas. The challenge then becomes making sure that these new ideas actually meet a need.

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Supporting Open Source at Architexa

Posted in About on December 16th, 2010 by Vineet Sinha1 Comment

We are working hard to help developers easily understand and document code. One thing that we have noticed is that the open source community continually faces challenges in these areas. New developers join projects frequently and at times committers have to leave a project. Without quality documentation code can quickly deteriorate.

We are great supporters of Open Source Software and have wanted to contribute by making it easier for developers and the community to document their code. As of today, we are providing free licenses for the Architexa Suite to those willing to upload good documentation, add comments, and vote on good diagrams every week. We will also appreciate it if you can give us feedback on what would make the Architexa Suite more useful for you.

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The hard part in ‘changing the world’

Posted in About on November 22nd, 2010 by Vineet Sinha1 Comment

The great part about being a coder is that we like building software that will make a difference. And not just that, we like taking on hard development challenges to build out simple solutions. Bringing these solutions to those that can benefit from them is another challenge in itself; one that many developers often have not had any experience with. Sure you can throw your code up on source-forge and hope people find it but if you really want to change the world you often have to put in a little more. read more »

 

Runners Up at MassChallenge!

Posted in About on October 27th, 2010 by Vineet SinhaBe the first to comment

We have had a wild ride the last two months – which is why I have unfortunately not been able make many posts recently. Since we launched in June, the response for Architexa has been great, and after getting invited to apply for MassChallenge we entered into one of the largest startup competitions ever with around 500 entrants. Three months and a lot of mentoring later, we emerged as runner-ups. Yes, being selected as one of the top startups at MassChallenge is great, but wow, did we learn a lot!

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Wasting Time With Test Driven Development?

Posted in Agile & Development Methodologies, Design Patterns & Architecture on August 5th, 2010 by Vineet Sinha13 Comments

Many teams are moving to test driven development and very often this a good thing. In a drive towards increased code stability and maintainability, good test cases can be very helpful. But this is not always the case; while working with development teams, most teams seem to have one or more critical problems. It seems that it is easy to do Test Driven Development (TDD) badly – below are five situations that I have seen multiple times.
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Eclipse (Helios) rocks and a few critiques

Posted in Developer Tools on July 30th, 2010 by Vineet Sinha4 Comments

Helios has been out for over a month – and we have been using it. Yes, we are a little biased, but when you are working with and leading teams of 10+ developers you need to be practical. There are a number of things that Eclipse does really well, but there are a few things that we would like to see better.

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Implications of limited understanding in code..

Posted in Documentation & Communication on July 15th, 2010 by Vineet Sinha4 Comments

We know that programmers do spend a lot of time understanding code. But what is not discussed as much are the implications of this limited understanding.

The reality of implementing new features or just fixing bugs is that the architecture of our underlying system continues to change. With time pressures to deliver such code updates, code changes often need to be made without thorough understanding and as development continues the code quality deteriorates. As such development continues, the system grows into a state where the “Cost of Change” rises rapidly over time, and the inability to meet user needs leads to the failure of many projects. read more »

 

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