Freelance Developer

I'm in Brighton at the moment, and therefore made a map of some of the nice galleries and places to see there.

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Greenhopper, an agile project management plugin for JIRA has been acquired by Atlassian.

This is a great plugin that creates broad agile capabilities to JIRA - which means that agile teams can use JIRA not only as a bug tracker, but also as a planning board for their sprints. It got some great reporting tools complete with burndown charts.

We implemented Greenhopper for the teams at NHST Media Group, and it really helped the execution of our agile processes

We wanted to update some old hibernate DAOs we had laying around which were implemented using singletons.  Instead of using singletons we wanted to wire these up using the Spring context. This was seemed to be an easy refactoring task. However, diving into the code we came to realize that we had several taglibs developed (extending from SimpleTagSupport) that was using these DAOs. And since you can't have constructors for these tags to dependency inject our DAOs we had to look elsewhere.

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I've lately been spending my working hours getting rechargenews.com up and running. And now its here! The web release was friday 9th, and the first printed newspaper came out today.

All the design was delivered to us from apt, but we implemented the design and controllers inhouse. And I'm almost a bit proud to say that this has become one of the most visually and user friendly news sites on the web.

Rechargenews will deliver news and editorials on renewable energy - an important issue in today. And it is my hope that it will influence people to make choiches that will lead to a habitable planet in the future.

Using scrum on this project has made us able to deliver on time, and with an acceptable feature set. More will surely come in the future, but the important bits are already there.

This release marked the end of my commitment for this project at this time, and I will be moving my attention to the new work that needs to be done to dn.no - the leading financial news site in Norway.

There are times when you want to embed 3rd party elements into your web pages. If you have a high traffic site which has time critical output, you might come to realize that your 3rd party vendor doesn't have the same uptime as yourself, resulting in delayed GET statements that seem to bog down your site.

Here you are left with a couple of choices.

• Ditching the supplied elements all together, usually a very unpopular decision.
• Caching it - which might be a problem with licensing and time critical elements.
• Use JavaScript to fetch those elements - as explained in this article.

The goal here is to give a usable page to your visitors as quickly as possible.

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I live in Norway. And with the advent of the new FRA law in Sweden a lot of shouting about political intervention and pressure has come forth in the local media. Big companies in Norway are asking if there can be ways to route traffic around Sweden to their destination. Complaints have been lodged to the EU. And philosophical discussions have surfaced that this is a way to treat everyone as a criminal until proven innocent - turning the entire legal system on its head.

However, I won't discuss this, but another aspect which hasn't been discussed much. This case gives the public insight into how the protocols of the internet work: Internet traffic crosses borders. This is a fact. Even if sender and recipient is in the same country traffic can cross national borders. This is how this technology is built, and is even considered one of the strengths of the internet. As one node goes down traffic will still find a way through somehow.

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We use IRC as our main communication channel here at the office. And after setting up Bamboo as our continuous integration server I wanted to hook it up to our channel so I could get some automatic flaming of those build-breakers.

Its been some years since I last wrote anything for IRC. And the only thing I had ever programmed in before was eggdrop. But I wanted something leaner - and preferably written in python. I ended up with Kibot. It seemed to have everything I needed - namely timer support.

Bamboo have several RSS feeds you can tap into. I wanted to use the feed for all failed builds. Have the bot iterate over these items (I used feedparser for this) and send a message to a channel.

I finally ended up with Murphy. A chap who will give full notice of your shortcomings as a programmer.

You can grab the source and play around with it yourself if you like.

Now I just need to plug in an insult generator. Anyone have any ideas where I can find a particularily nasty dictionary?

In accordance with my previous article about search engine optimization tips, I will in this article concentrate on how to dissect your website and figure out what needs to be done. And I'll only use free tools doing it :)

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I'm doing search engine optimization on some of our sites now. And in that process I have collected some tips about what helps the crawler do its job.

You are looking for new readers for your glorious content, but nobody is finding their way to your site. Did you wall yourself in by an accident?

SEO is usually a lot of common sense, really, and if you have good developers on your site with a bit of time on their hands you can do the job yourself instead of contracting this out.

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I wanted a tool to write acceptance tests with. Something easy to set up, and of course, flexible. What gets churned out here at my company are webapps, so I had this in mind when I went ahead looking for the right tool. After browsing around I came to the conclusion that the tools with most drive behind them was FIT and Selenium. Here follows my encounter with them.

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