Dan North

The vast majority of Java enterprise applications are architected along the lines of Sun's original PetStore showcase application. Rather than seeing this as a market stall displaying all the J2EE goods on offer, developers took it as a blueprint for enterprise applications. It c... (more)

Complex enterprise applications are generally hard to maintain, and risky and difficult to change. As a new developer on a team, a large legacy code base is often difficult to understand, especially when the code has evolved over a long period and new functionality has been graft... (more)

I am always on the look out for good questions to ask candidates in an interview. Not the "How many oranges can I fit in this room?" kind of nonsense (the stock response to which is apparently "with or without us standing in it?"). Nor the picky, encyclopedic type such as "In the... (more)