Residential gas furnaces must all have a minimum AFUE of 95% beginning in five years. Some in the HVAC industry say the new Department of Energy rule will ultimately hurt homeowners.

This winter, HVAC contractors might be dealing with a wetter winter than years past, coupled with more snowfall than maybe most people would like.

The biggest tip is that combustion analysis should be the first and last thing completed during any heating appliance repair.

Using water to transfer heat energy into the home can minimize or even eliminate the issues of dry air and loud operation.

If contractors don’t have a plan in place to handle red tag furnace second opinions, they can expect some mistakes.

The residential heating showcase is designed to help HVAC contractors learn about the new heating equipment that is available for the upcoming cooler months.

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In this episode Michael and Markus talk about patterns. Starting with some of their "most used" patterns, they go into some detail about the history of patterns. They then discuss the various pattern forms as well as some misconceptions about patterns. Other topics include the domains that are covered by patterns as well as pattern languages.

In this episode, our guest Andreas Rueping and Markus talk about documenting software. While this is a topic that many people don't like or consider fun, it is nonetheless very important. Based on his book, Agile Documentation, we talk about various aspects documenting software such as what to document, when to document, which media to use as well as specifically a number of layouting tips for nice documents.

This is the fourth and final episode on the fundamentals of Software Architecture. We talk mainly about architectural styles and patterns, as introduced in the POSA 1 Book. We also discuss a little bit the process of actually using those patterns for architecting systems.

In this Episode we talk about dynamic languages for statically-typed minds, or in other words: which are the interesting features people should learn when they go from a langauge such as Java or C# to a language like Python or Ruby. We used Ruby as the concrete example language.

We started the discussion about important features with the concept of dynamically changing an object's type and the idea of message passing. We then looked at the concepts of blocks and closures. Next in line is a discussion about functions that create functions as well as currying. This lead into a quick discussion about continuations. Open classes, aliasing and the relationship to AOP was next on our agenda.

We then looked considered a somewhat more engineering-oriented view and looked at the importance of testing and what are the best steps of getting from static programming to dynamic programming. Finally, we discussed a bit about the current (as of October 2006) state of dynamic languages on mainstream platforms.

This episode is a discussion with Jonathan Aldrich (Assistant Professor at CMU) about static analysis. The discussion covered theory as well as practice and tools. We started with an explanation of what static analysis actually is, which kinds of errors it can find and how it is different from testing and reviews. The core challenge of such an analysis tool is to understand the semantics of the program and reduce its possible state space to make it analysable - in effect reconstructing the programmer's intent from the code. The user can "help" the tool with this challenge by using suitable annotations; also, languages could do a better job of being analysable. The conceptual discussion was concluded by looking at the principles of static analysis (termination, soundness. precision) and how this approach relates to model analysis. The second more practical part started out with a discussion of how Microsoft successfully uses static analysis in their Windows development. We then discussed some of the tools available; these include Findbugs, Coverity, Codesonar, Clockwork, Fortify, Polyspace and Codesurfer. To conclude the discussion of tools, we discussed the commonalities and differences with architecture visualization tools as well as metrics and heuristics. Part three of the discussion briefly looked at how to introduce static analysis tools into an organization's development process and tool chain. We concluded the discussion by looking at situations where static analysis does not work, as well as at the FLUID research project at CMU.

In this Episode we talked about the new POSA 4 book which has recently been published. We talk to two of the authors, Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann (the third author, Doug Schmidt was not available - and he had also been on the podcast a couple of times :-)). The book contains a pattern language for distributed systems. It contains 114 patterns that had been published before by many different other authors. The patterns have been rewritten to form a consistent language. We basically talked through the different sections of the book, which gives a really good overview over the challenges and the solutions of building distributed systems. These sections include From Mud to Structure, Distribution Infrastructure, Event Demultiplexing and Dispatching, Interface Partitioning, Component Patitioning, Application Contrl, Concurrency, Synchronization, Object Interaction, Adaptazion and Extension, Modal Behaviour, Resource Management and finally, Database Access. The book references several other previous works (as listed below). Interestingly, many of these referenced works and authors have also been discussed previously on the podcast. Here are the back references:

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans
• Messaging Patterns, Gregor Hohpe
• POSA 2 Patterns, Doug Schmidt
• Concurrency: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and the interview with Goetz and Holmes
• Remoting Patterns Part 1 and Part 2
• POSA3, Resource Management

In this episode we talk with Gerard Meszaros about problems and challenges doing unit testing in real-world projects. Starting from a short discussion about the importance of automated unit testing we spend most of this episode to talk about every day problems doing unit testing and how those problems can be solved. Based on this book on xunit testing patterns, Gerard talks about his experiences with unit test smells as an analogy to code smells. He describes an impressive set of unit testing patterns to overcome those difficult testing situations and illustrates them with nice examples everybody doing unit testing will feel familiar with.

In this special Episode we briefly discuss the upcoming Patterns Journal with the two editors, Ralph Johnson and James Noble.

In this episode Eberhard Wolff speaks with Jürgen Höller, the co-found of the Spring framework. Spring is a tremendously successful Java framework so they discuss the design of large frameworks and the issues that arise in the evolution. Jürgen explains the management of dependencies in the framework, how to structure such a framework, how to offer compatibility for the existing user base while evolving the framework and the role of metrics during development.

In this episode we talk with Jeff DeLuca about Feature Driven Development (FDD). As one member of the agile methods family FDD is not so famous as Scrum or Extreme Programming but is becoming more and more popular, especially for situations where you have fixed price contracts. As the inventor of FDD Jeff gives short introduction to the method itself, talks about the basic ideas behind FDD and discusses with us how FDD relates to other members of the agile family.

In this episode we talk to Matthew Wall (Guardian News and Media) and Erik Doernenburg (Thoughtworks) about their work on the new guardian.co.uk website. We discuss the challenge of scalability and interactivity, their use of Domain Driven Design, some of the technical building blocks as well as the approaches they use for performance measuring and scalability tuning.

In this espisode we take a closer look at relational database systems and the concepts behind them. We start by discussing the relational paradigm, its concepts and ramifications, and go on to architectural aspects.

This episode is a discussion with Andrew Watson, Technical Director of the Object Management Group. The episode is structured into five parts. We start with the history of the OMG and its early work. Then we look at the set of standards it has been (or is currently) working on. Next is a discussion of the standardization process used by the OMG, including the much-debated topic of compliance testing. We then look at OMG's relationship to other standards bodies (W3C, OASIS). Finally Andrew and I briefly discuss our common passion, gliding :-)

In this episode we talk with Jeff McAffer about building platforms. We start with a brief discussion about what a platform is in contrast to a framework or an application. Drawing from his experiences working on the Eclipse platform for years, Jeff talks with us about how to develop platforms, why developing a platform is different from developing an application, what makes a good platform great, and why API design becomes so extremely important for platforms. He provides us with some insights on how the development process and the client collaboration for platform development could look like and what has and has not worked in the past.

In this episode we take a brief look at Jetbrains' Meta Programming System, a language workbench for creating external DSLs or for extending existing languages (such as Java). In a brief telephone discussion, Konstantin Solomatov explains what the system does and how it works. The system has recently been released into public beta and will be made available under then Apache 2.0 Open Source license.

This episode is an introduction to user interface design with Joachim Machate of UID. We talk about the importance of user interface design, about its relationship to the overall software engineering process, as well as about UID's process for systematic user interface design.

This episode is a discussion about code and metrics visualization with Michele Lanza. Michele invented the Code Cities idea about which he talks in this episode.

In this episode Markus discusses with Chris Read basics and some advanced topics in the space of continuous integration. We cover concepts, some tools, as well as a number of best practices.

In this episode Michael interviews one of our regular listeners: Petri Ahonen. Petri introduces Software Configuration Management by defining key terms and describing relevant concepts.

This episode is a discussion with various authors of patterns reviewed at EuroPLoP 2009. Topics include Product Line Engineering, Distributed Development, Open Source and Embedded Systems

Announcement regarding the release cycle.

In this episode, Robert talks with Nati Shalom about the emergence of large-system architectures consisting of a grid of high-memory nodes.

This episode is an update on the developments around the Scala language.

Sven Apel explains why developing software in a feature-oriented manner is so vital for us as software engineers and why objects are simply not enough.

Recording Venue: University of Passau Guest: Sven Apel Host: Stefan In this second episode on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD), Sven Apel gives us an overview of programming language and tool support for FOSD. He introduces the Eclipse-based FeatureIDE which covers important phases of the FOSD process, namely domain implementation as well as configuration and generation. […]

Recording Venue: Phone Guest: Steve Will IBM i (formerly known as OS/400) is an advanced object-based operating system by IBM that runs thousands of businesses around the world.  Steve Will, the Chief Architect of IBM i speaks with us about the history, technical features, and underlying architecture discussing the concepts of Single Level Store, integrated […]

Cassandra is a distributed, scalable non-relational data store influenced by the Google BigTable project and many of the distributed systems techniques pioneered by the Amazon Dynamo paper.

Recording Venue: MongoSF, San Francisco Guest: Dwight Merriman As application data size and throughput have outgrown the processing and storage needs of commodity servers, replication has become an increasingly important strategy. In this episode, Robert talks with Dwight Merriman about database replication. Topics covered include replication basics, master-slave versus master-master, failure and recovery, replication versus […]

Recording Venue: Skype Guest: Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage In this episode, we talk with Pramod Sadalage and Martin Fowler about database evolution and agile database development. We discuss the basic challenges for working with a database in an agile development culture and how to include database design and most of all, database evolution, in […]

Recording Venue: Skype Guest: Michael Hunger Michael Hunger of Neo Technology, and a developer on the Neo4J database, joins Robert to discuss graph databases. Graph databases fall within the larger category of NoSQL databases but they are not primarily a solution to problems of scale. They differentiate themselves from RDBMS in offering a data model built […]

Recording Venue: Skype Guest: Michael Stonebraker Dr. Michael Stonebraker, one of the leading researchers and technology entrepreneurs in the database space, joins Robert for a discussion of database architecture and the emerging NewSQL family of databases. Dr. Stonebraker opens with his take on how the database market is segmented around a small number of use […]

Martin Thompson, proprietor of the blog Mechanical Sympathy, founder of the LMAX disruptor open source project, and a consultant and frequent speaker on high performance computing talks with Robert about computer program performance. Martin explains the meaning of the term “mechanical sympathy,” derived from auto racing, and its relevance to program performance: the importance of […]