Finally had sometime to progress the port of Hibernate Search… We are intending to be feature complete with Hibernate Search 3.0.1 GA and at the moment I would say that we have ported about 80% of the code. I have also updated the libraries so that we are using Lucene 2.3.1 and NHibernate 2.1

One of the things I’ve been working on over the last couple of years for myself and for clients, is making the development environment as frictionless as possible. By this I mean removing all the little annoyances that get in the way of producing good quality software. This guiding idea has led me to one guiding principal: keep everything under source control! For example, one classic problem I’ve encountered is that the build works on the developer’s workstation but not on the build server or vice versa.

No this isn’t about how Haskell evaluates stuff, but how people design and write code. There’s a mobile phone ad showing in the UK at the moment about how it’s the impatient people that drive towards new innovation and in software at least I strongly disagree. On the contrary, lazy programmers rule. I’m a lazy programmer, I can’t bear writing the same code more than a couple of times and when I recognise the second instance I refactor it into a function.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to write down some of the stuff I’ve learnt over the past couple of years on how to structure my development environment so that it’s easy to use and ties in nicely with things like continuous integration and automated testing. So this is sort of a “head-up” of the topics I think I will be covering over the coming weeks.. Tools choice Source control Project structure Binary dependencies Continuous Integration It won’t necessarily be in this order and I may throw some other stuff in if I find the inspiration

Well I finally gave in and joined the blogging community. This will be a general rant on technology, running a small software consultancy business and anything else that takes my fancy. To give you all a bit of background I’ve been writing software for about 30 years now, having started on a mixture of home built (anyone remember the Tangerine MicroTan 65?) and early home computers includinng the Commodore Pet, Amstrad 1512, BBC Micro and Atari 1040ST.