Starting a Business as an Open Source Consultant

Software developers who want to make a living in open source often consider becoming independent consultants. This advice from two successful developers may help you get started.

continue...

Learning Job Interview Skills from Actors

People comfortably tell you that every job interview is an audition. Well, yeah, sure. But few people tell you how an actor gets past the audition to get the part. Here's a few lessons from a famous acting book that just might help.

continue...

Mash that trash -- Incremental compaction in the IBM JDK Garbage Collector

Introduction

Java applications do not have memory management issues, because the garbage collector of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) takes care of all the storage issues. The garbage collector in the IBM JVM is based on the mark-sweep-compact (MSC) algorithm, where garbage collection (GC) takes place in three phases. At the end of the mark and sweep phases, free space is available, but there is a possibility of heap fragmentation. The compact phase alleviates the fragmentation problem by moving chunks of allocated space towards the lower end of the heap, helping create contiguous free memory at the other end.

continue...

Java Memory Problems

Memory Leaks and other memory related problems are among the most prominent performance and scalability problems in Java. Reason enough to discuss this topic in more detail.
continue...