Garbage collections are like the engine of a car, we know it works, we know that it powers the car, but not much else, but once it breaks down, we usually don’t have a too much of a clue on how to fix it. In this episode we talk about how garbage…

So you’re programming along when suddenly support calls and says that the application just “disappeared”, or, the server process is not there anymore, both of them leaving you with a hprof.pid file. You have just witnessed the murder of a Java Virtual…

In this podcast we turn and talk of that embarassing uncle that every API has (java.util.date), you know, the one that you have to live with because is family, but don’t really like that much? We dive into what to avoid when using Date (and Calendar),…

We finish our discussion on the ObjectOutputStream by covering the SerialVersionUID, and then move onto ObjectOutputStream’s citadine cousin, XMLEncoder and Decoder (and why would you go and hang out with it). We also make a quick introduction to “The…

We all have the need to serialize/deserialize objects (either through the “wire” or to file). In this podcast we go and analyze what exactly happens when we create an ObjectOutputStream and write to it, and more importantly what pitfalls are there to…

Every developer at one point in time runs into the question, what is beautiful code? Is it code that is expressed concisely? is it code that does a lot in a few lines of code. Well, while we’re not the DeveloperPeople’s magazine at least there are…

The State pattern is very useful, it’s just hard to spot, and at the beginning a little hard to understand. On this podcast we cover the state pattern with a specific example of its use, plus tips on how to spot when to use it (really that’s the…

Taking the performance theme, we move into the dark corners of Java Swing and discover that it is not a lame horse at all! Swing is very fast (with support for directX and OpenGL!), but sometimes is hard to get it to perform right. In this podcast we…

In the second part of optimization, we talk about the tools (or more properly algorithms) that you can use to optimize a piece of code. Ever wonder how to make a piece of code faster? or difference between caching and Divide-and-Conquer? then tune in!…

We all love speed, code speed that is! In this podcast we delve into code optimizations, and what does it mean to optimize for speed. We go over what is the mind-state that you need as you optimize code and offer sneaky shortcuts that allows 10-fold…