Why are mobile application sales dropping?: "the developers I talk to are not Java houses making simple add-ons like games and ringtones. There are anecdotal reports that sales of those are going pretty well. What I'm talking about is sales of more substantial applications, generally written to run native on the device's operating system. If the phone is becoming a multimedia computer, as some vendors claim, sales of these more sophisticated applications ought to be booming."

So sales of complex applications for mobile devices are stalling, whilst those of simpler ones are doing well.

Ninjas needed: "Extras needed for the next Brighton Wok film shoot - we need martial arts trained fighters to star in the largest fight scene in Brighton Wok so far. If you’ve been waiting for your chance to star, fight and die in this film then this is it!"

How Long Would It Take if Everything Went Wrong?: "While it's impossible to give a perfect estimate, it's a good idea to start with the worst case scenario and extrapolate backwards to the best case."

Finding bugs with FindBugs: "However, there's a class of development tool that can also be used to root out bugs before they happen, and that's a static code analysis tool. In contrast to dynamic analysis, which involves looking at code that's running, static analysis focuses on source or object code (byte code in the Java world).
One such tool is FindBugs, which analyses Java byte code to flag potential errors."

The Noble Art of Maintenance Programming: "We should probably have our best developers doing software maintenance, not whoever draws the shortest straw."

+1

There's a set of skills, like the ability to delve into an unfamiliar codebase and architecture and try to work out what's going on, which doing maintenance work builds. And whilst it can be frustrating and sometimes doesn't offer the same opportunities for creative expression that starting-from-scratch can, it's really good experience IMHO.

One of the projects we have on at the moment has a hefty maintenance angle to it, and it's been interesting watching the guys doing the work go through the daunting process of familiarising themselves with the project, the frustration of working out sometimes baroque elements of it, and the eventual satisfaction when things come together.