For all companies who write software of any kind the source code is one of the most valuable assets the company owns. But what about the dependencies? What about those third party libraries that are downloaded by tools such as NPM and Maven?

I recently had a discussion with a colleague about why squashing commits in Git pull requests, or any source control for that matter, was bad. The discussion was started with a suggestion that developers (at work) should start to follow a specific commit message format. This was so that release notes could be automatically generated based on the commits in a given release. Now to do this, and have a release note that looks sensible, it relies on very few commits per feature or bug fix, which in turn involves squashing developer's commits. While I don't object to a standardised commit message and automated release notes (in fact I'm a massive supporter of devops and build/task automation), I believe that squashing commits is a bad idea. Here's why.

Wordpress is great but had too many bells and whistles for what I needed, not to mention the requirement of a MySQL server, so I recently decided to move to Jekyll and GH Pages. I'd previously had my own Apache instance where I could do all the <code>.htaccess</code> magic I liked, but how to perform redirects using Jekyll and GitHub pages?

Testing Java servlets reliably can often be difficult. Generally the main business logic is contained in a different class which can be tested in isolation, but in some cases it is necessary to have some logic in the servlet itself.