Wow, it’s been almost two years since Darkfall (Online) was released!

I was involved from the very beginning, in 1999 when we were a bunch of young inexperienced guys with a a dream of making “the best game evah” ™. We started a company here in Norway in 2000, moved to Greece in 2003 and released Darkfall, a badass full-loot player versus player  mmo, on the 25th of February 2009. That pretty much amounts to 10 years making one single game. Continue reading “Game developer, and then what?” →

Dependency management in Maven is a tricky business. At the company where I work we have several large projects that include many different libraries and all dependencies are managed by Maven.  These projects end up having transitive dependencies where the libraries our projects depend on have dependencies on yet other libraries.

Maven does a good job of including all the transitive dependencies, but sometimes it resolves itself in such a way that Maven selects an older version of a library when given the choice between two different versions of the same library. This is extremely annoying when the older version contains bugs or lacks features that it’s dependent library needs.

A good colleague of mine, Morten Kjetland, has created an excellent Maven plugin called ‘deptools‘ that solves this issue by raising a compile error if it detects that an older transient dependency has been chosen instead of the newer version.

Deptools has saved us from a lot of head-scratching and frustration, and could potentially do the same for you, so head on over to the GitHub deptools repository and download it. It is open source and written in Scala, but works as any other plugin for Maven 2 or 3.

I spent this last weekend in Rome. I got to see the Colosseum, Pantheon, Saint Peters’ Basilica, Piazza Navona and more.

Colosseum was the most impressive building. Even today in its broken-down state, it still is incredibly impressive. I would love to be able to take a 3d-tour of the place as it was when it was built. A good second best will be watching The Gladiator again soon! Continue reading “Weekend in Rome” →

I got back from JavaZone last week; a 2-day Java-oriented programming conference. JavaZone 2010 was a very enjoyable and educational experience. I got to attend quite a few really good talks, including some good lightning talks. The most memorable talks in no particular order:

• Emergent Design — Neal Ford
• How we blew our shot at beating Spotify, spending two metric truckloads of cash doing it — Espen Dalløkken
• It Is Possible to Do Object-Oriented Programming in Java — Kevlin Henney
• Leveraging Open Source – Everything You Wanted to Know About Open Source that Nobody Told You (including getting paid to do it) — Jeff Genender
• Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit — Nathaniel Schutta

As you can see, most of these talks don’t have much to do with Java, but they were all great and might make me a better developer if I take just a bit of the wisdom to heart.

I was particularly impressed with the professional execution of the conference. Just about everything went smooth as could be (well, wifi at conferences is always a nightmare). Dinner and lunch was served to two thousand attendees with no more than a few minutes waiting once you queued up!

All in all a great conference! I am already looking forward to JavaZone 2011.

PS! If any of the above talks sound interesting, all the talks have been made available as videoes linked from the Javazone main page.

PPS! Here is the JavaZone 2010 music video:

Most programmers think they can recognize good code and a lot of them think they produce good code, but the sad truth is that not a lot of programmers actually do. Between time constraints, feature creep, and laziness, programmers hardly ever end up producing super quality code. Continue reading “The Code Quality game” →

I guess this is the post where I say: Welcome to my new and improved website!

I’ve had a long pause in writing anything in this blog. Mostly due to laziness, but other contributing factors have been Getting Darkfall Released, followed by Moving Back To Norway, and last but in no way least: Becoming a Dad for The Second Time. That’s a time-consuming trilogy.

Well, all that has happened, and now I am back. I fixed my website (yay WordPress!), and I am going to be writing bits and pieces here again. At some point soon I am also hoping to put my experiences in the making of Darkfall into a post. When I do, it will be posted here.

Anyway, until the next post:

Have fun and code hard!

Nå er det 25 år siden PCen ble til, med Microsoft sitt operativsystem. Jeg vet ikke om det bør feires med glede eller tårer, men det har forandret verden. Det er sikkert.

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Jeg så nettopp ferdig The Ghost in Your Genes. Den handler om et tema jeg hørte om første gang for et par måneder siden, som heter epigenetics. Kort fortalt, handler det om at genetikk og arving av gener ikke er helt slik man har trodd til nå.

Man har trodd at genene til en person ble ført videre fra en generasjon til neste uforandret, og kun mutasjoner kunne forandre genene nevneverdig. Epigenetics prøver å forklare noe som er oppdaget de siste årene; nemlig at arvematerialet til en person har plutselig blitt forandret i en generasjon, og så ført videre til de neste generasjonene. Epi er gresk for “på”, og epigenetikk er genetikk oppå genene. Epigenetics sier at det er eget system som gjør at gener kan bli slått på eller av, avhengig av ytre faktorer, som f.eks. miljø eller stress. Dvs at miljøet til bestefaren din kan påvirke livslengden din, eller sjansen for at du får visse sykdommer. Det betyr at ens valg å ikke ta vare på sin egen kropp kan påvirke generasjonene som kommer etter deg også. Dine barn og barnebarn kan få kreft fordi du røyker!

Epigenetikk er både spennende og skremmende på samme tid. Hvis dette stemmer, så betyr det at man har et enda større ansvar for å ta vare på seg selv, for man tar da også vare på genene og helsen til kommende generasjoner. Det betyr også at man lettere kan forklare hvordan tretti tusen gener i genomet til mennesker kan ha så mye variasjon i seg.

Denne helgen kjøpte jeg ny harddisk til linux-boksen min. Den gamle harddisken hvinte som en sliten sekkepipe spillt av en full skotte. Det tok litt tid å finne informasjonen jeg trengte, og det jeg fant var spredt på flere sider. Siden jeg pleier å glemme sånne ting til neste gang jeg trenger det, skrev jeg ned hva jeg gjorde, og la det ut her på hjemmesiden min som en How-to artikkel.

I den forbindelse fjernet jeg “programmering” fra venstre menyen, og erstattet den med “artikler”. Jeg får prøve å rettferdiggjøre siste r’n i “artikler” etterhvert.

Procrastination – det å utsette ting. Det er noe jeg kjenner til.

Nå finnes det det visst en løsning for oss prokrastinatorer: Structured Procrastination!