Programmatically generating files in Microsoft file-formats is a common feature in applications I know. Excel spreadsheets are used for reporting, PowerPoint slides for presenting data and Word text files for textual reports. In this article, I want to focus on the current file format for PowerPoint: .pptx. The difficulty in creating these files lies in their format.

Given you visit a full-time event in another city, maybe a fair or a conference. What do you do when that event comes to an end? Do you rush to the airport to catch your flight? Do you hurry that much that you forget to say everyone goodbye? In the last hour of the event, do you constantly check your watch hoping you will be out soon enough? Well, don't. Just stay.

This is an article about a new tool in our project: the library jsoup. I want to describe the problem jsoup solves for us and the arguments why jsoup is the right library to solve this problem.

Motivation

As in other applications, our users can input text via HTML editor. Often, they copy-paste content from several sources such as Microsoft Office. Hence, a lot of obscure, malformed and incomplete HTML with proprietary tags is thrown at our application.

Nowadays, Scrum is everywhere. Eventually, it will come and get you. A while ago, it started to get me. In this and the following articles, I will document the process of (hopefully!) becoming a certified Scrum Master. So if you feel that the scrum monster is gaining on you, read on and learn to become part of the hype! ;)

There have been a lot of changes in the last months. My work as an employed software developer kind of got to a new level because of the changes in my project. I'm learning a whole lot in this project and am looking forward to learn even more. My employer offers me great opportunities and my spare time projects and my mentoring also extend my horizon.

For my last JavaFX articles, I wanted to show the animated results directly at this website. At the time being, there's no guarantee that a visitor can execute an embedded JavaFX application. Because of that, some bloggers tend to embedd youtube videos with their application in action. That too would need some setup (youtube account, making a screen capture video, ... ). So I searched for a simple solution to display screen capture footage directly at a website. Despite it's bad reputation, an animated gif works on every browser I know.

Reading stackoverflow and blog articles about development, I came across many code snippets and examples. Also, as the author of blog articles and stackoverflow help cries I myself put some of these snippets into the net. Some of the code I've seen and written was good and comprehensible. Some was not. Today I learned about the SSCCE principle that states that example code in forums and articles should be a Short, Self Contained, Correct Example.

Just visit http://sscce.org/ and read for yourself.

One of my weak spots as a developer are estimations. I simply cannot estimate how long a software developing task will take. In this article, I write about how I came up with an estimation to a bundle of tasks, how accurate it was and what I took away from it.

Recently, a good friend of mine blogged about Degraph. Degraph is a tool to visualize dependencies between packages. Not only are these dependencies shown in a graph, but the nodes of the graph can be expanded so that dependencies can be traced into packages.

Since reading the biography of Steve Jobs, I more and more do agree with the idea of minimalization. Obviously, he had huge success by simply leaving out things and concentrating on the rest. In recent months it became clear to me that this also applies to software development.