Last week I attended the EuroClojure conference, which is the yearly meeting of the Clojure community. As a Clojure beginner I was interested in getting a glimps of what is all the buzz about this language currently receives. So, just let me share my impressions and thoughts with you.

Yesterday I attended the MongoDB Berlin conference which is a one day conference by 10gen to offer a space for collaboration and exchange around MongoDB. I want to sum up some (hopefully) interesting points for you.

Last weeks I had to deal with implementing several rest apis. Some with Play 2, some with Spring MVC. Due only Play supports build-in mechanism for integration tests I had to integrate support for them in every project where I used Spring MVC. Those are typically Maven builds. Maven does not support separate integration tests with a running Tomcat (or any other webcontainer) by default. Hence you have to get your hands dirty.

Highly skilled developers want to work with other highly skilled and smart developers. That’s what I can tell so far. You are really running into serious problems if you are loosing all the highly skilled ones which rock your projects and initiate changes to improve the way work is done in your organization. Maybe I am too harsh and unfair but I think you need highly skilled developers and talents to be able to adapt to new technologies and markets.

Did you ever use Maven in one of your projects? First you probably were amazed by the way you can declare dependencies and use all the nice plugins. Then you may realized that the handling of transitive dependencies is solved… well, let me say it could be better. But there is another Maven plugin that helps you to clean your dependencies and also to ensure that transitive dependencies will never cause to rot your dependency definitions again.