• Refactoring Your Application April 28, 2009

    If you read articles, visit websites, read tech books or visit conferences you will undoubtedly have heard about the term refactoring. There is a good chance you’ve been refactoring yourself already, whether you knew it or not. In this article you will be introduced to the practice of refactoring. The basic definition will be discussed, as well as reasons for refactoring and how to actually refactor your code. The difference between refactoring your code and rewriting your code will also be explained.

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  • Surviving a Plane Crash April 23, 2009

     

    Introduction

    NU.nl is a well known news website in its homeland, The Netherlands, and is actively expanding into other countries. On an average day NU.nl will serve up 7 million page views; peak traffic days are more than triple that number. In short, it is one of the top 10 Dutch web sites in terms of traffic. Previously, on our corporate blog, Erik Snoeijs discussed the technologies deployed while building out the back-end of NU.nl in is article “NU.nl; the back end”. In this article we want to look at the front end that we architected for NU.nl, and how we designed the system to handle both regular traffic and peaks.

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  • Buy vs. Build April 15, 2009

    One of the biggest struggles in any software development company is “Buy vs. Build”. How do you strike a balance between writing custom software and purchasing off-the-shelf solutions. This is something that is very hard and everyone gets it wrong every once in a while. In this article we will explore the way that Ibuildings approaches this issue, in the hopes that it helps others in getting it right more often.

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