I've been setting up a dashboard for my team to display metrics. After looking around at the various options (and having an abortive stab at writing a framework myself) I found and OSS version called Dashing written by Shopify that suited the needs.

There's a nice example on YouTube which I think gives a better feel than the built in samples.

I thought I'd put a few hints and tips after what I've learnt.

I've been pretty busy with a new job recently. I've not been able to find a complete Maven+AspectJ template on the Internet, I though I'd quickly knock one up and pop it on Github.

It contains:

• pom.xml with necessary dependencies and plugins
• an aspect
• a class that aspect advises
• a test to ensure the aspect is correctly applied

https://github.com/alexec/aspectj-example

Enjoy.

I've been finessing the way that I deal with tasks over the last few years, having tried GTD and found that it needed some tweaks. I think this is normal, any methodology might need changing to adapt to different people and roles. Specifically:

• All work comes in via my email inbox, or verbally.
• I manage a team, so sometimes I need to be aware of what they're working on.
• I need to check for new email about once an hour in case of urgent emails (I can't just read it once a day).

I've release v2 today. Details can be found of the issues on Github. The top issues are:

• Support for patches
• Better support for 64bit hosts
• Example projects for Ant and Maven

The roadmap for v3 will focus on performance:

• Use a single global caching and snapshotting system for much faster start-up.
• Gradle examples.

A quick plugin for Maven using Apache BSF to execute scripts:

https://github.com/alexec/script-maven-plugin

Just been reading Thoughworks tech radar from last October. Some interesting things in there:

- Log as data
- Vert.x - a great looking small web server
- Raik and Datomic data stores

http://www.thoughtworks.com/articles/technology-radar-october-2012

1. Unzip the jars

unzip app.zip -d dist
mkdir classes
find dist -name '*.jar' -exec unzip -B {} -d classes ';'

mkdir -p src/main/java
cd classes
find . -name '*.class' | while read F ; do D=../src/main/java/$(dirname $F); mkdir -p $D ; jad -o -s java -d $D $F ; done
cd ..

This is easy, it is supported out of the box.

Step 1 - make sure each mojo has the JavaDoc, this will be used to generate your help files. E.g.: