Recently I came across a company that is forking several open source Java projects. I saw they were making a mistake that I also made a few years ago and have since learned from. In Maven's distributed repository architecture project artifacts, like JAR files, are uniquely identified by a coordinate system composed of a group identifier, an artifact identifier, a version number, optionally a classifier, and a packaging type. For instance, the most recent version of the Apache Commons Lang project has a Maven coordinate (i.e. groupId:artifactId:version:classifier:type ) of commons-lang:commons-lang:2.5::jar . A few years ago, if I wanted to make custom changes to this project I would get the source, make my changes and then deploy the result to our private Nexus repository under a new groupId such as com.jaxzin.oss:commons-lang:2.5::jar . That might seem reasonable. Then a year later or so I tried something different and changed the artifactId like this commons-lang:commons-lang-jax...

Last night was my first session as a volunteer at the Danbury Animal Welfare Society (DAWS). I had attended an orientation a few weeks back and that's when I saw the facility for the first time, learned about the standard operating procedures and policies, and got to meet some of the cats I'll be working with. Now I'm not a person that enjoys change or meeting new people, but other than my immediate family I don't think many people are aware because I try very hard to hide my discomfort. Who knows, I could be wrong so feel free to call me out in the comments! So far, this entire experience is quite out of my normal comfort zone, but I'm forcing myself to do this for several reasons. I learned about DAWS after attending their Puppy Love Ball , a fund-raiser they held in February, in support of a friend of mine who was honored as their Person of the Year. They premiered this mission video at the event and it had me hooked. To learn that DAWS is a shelter that ...

Today I drove up to Boston for the day to attend NoSQL Live . My experience so far within the NoSQL community has been limited to what we've built in-house at Disney and ESPN over the past decade to solve our scaling issues, more recently has been ESPN's use of Websphere eXtreme Scale , and the very latest has been my own experimentation with HBase which hasn't gotten much further than setting up a four node cluster. I've read a little about Cassandra, memcached, Tokyo Cabinet and that's about it. So before the sandman wipes away most of my first impressions of the technologies discussed today, I wanted to record my thoughts for posterity or, at the very least, tomorrow. Cassandra Cassandra seems to be the hottest NoSQL solution this month with press about both Twitter and Digg running implementations. My impression, I'm wary of "eventual consistency". I don't feel I understand the risk and ramifications well enough to design a system properly...