On Tuesday I am off to Oslo and this year’s JavaZone! It’s gonna be a blast This year there will be five of us from Integrasco attending the conference, hopefully next year we’ll be able to send all the developers and QA staff.

The agenda was just released last week and I have not had the time to sit down and figure out exactly what I want to see, but that will be the task for Monday or Tuesday evening I’ve found a couple of talks that I have to catch, especially Erik Hatcher‘s talk about Solr. But there’s a lot more space on my agenda to fill, and there does not seem to be a lack of interesting talks to fill it with this year either.

I’ll also be spending some time at the javaBin stand as I have previous years, so drop by and say hi

There’s a couple of videos on the JavaZone site which is worth checking out – very entertaining, even if you’re not a software developer!

We have just released a new website at Integrasco today, with a brand new logo design as well. A good upgrade for our online profile and we’re very pleased with it

Head on over to www.integrasco.com and have a look. Also make sure you become a fan of us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!

On Friday we had our Summer party with Integrasco. What a blast! It turned out a great evening with lots of good food, lots to drink, a good game of Kubb and generally just a great party – Integrasco style!

Here’s a couple of pictures from the party As the social media addicts that we are, we of course had our own Twitter hash-tag for the event

On our way to the party

The meat is on the barbecue!

The food is served. Look how perfect the beef is!

The staff enjoying themselves

Source QA tactical planning

The boss showing off his Kubb skills!

Source QA in action

Thanks for a great evening, all

I think in many ways the relief you feel when you manage to fix a hard-to-find bug can be compared to the feeling of intense pain going away – like painkillers when you have a terrible toothache.

I have been working on locating and fixing a bug in our crawlers at Integrasco, on and off, for the last couple of weeks. It has been a terrible stress factor and each day spent tracking data through the pipeline and debugging the code to pieces has yielded nothing. The error never occur in development, only in production – and at what seems to be a completely random pattern. All of you who know a bit of programming probably feel a cold breeze down their back right now – it’s a horrible situation to be in.

Luckily, this issue was not so severe that it has been stopping crucial parts of our system, but it had to be fixed. Today I finally discovered the source of the problem and I don’t think I have felt so good and relieved for a very long time. It was like I had been walking around with this toothache, crawling through the hot, burning Sahara desert, and finally reached a kind native with painkillers in his pocket – I guess you can only understand if you’re a developer

It’s been a few weeks since I have been really excited about going to work the next morning, but now I am really looking forward to getting in to work tomorrow and finally crush this bug with my Great Bat of Bug Crushing!

Had to share this, ’cause right now I feel great (might have something to do with the three beers I have just consumed too, actually…)!