Where do you look when your server application doesn’t work as expected? Application logs can provide invaluable information when the systems in production misbehave. That’s why a great software practitioner desings the application logs carefully. Let’s review a couple of basic tips for great logging in Java.

The Simple Logging Facade for Java (SLF4J) serves as a simple abstraction for various logging frameworks. Let’s look at how to configure SLF4J to work with SLF4J Simple logger, JDK 1.4 logger, Log4j, Logback and Log4j2 framework.

In this blogpost we’re going to configure the BIND server to accept dynamic updates. Client machines themselves will send the updates to the DNS server instead of letting DHCP server update the DNS. A great setup for situations where the DHCP server is not in your control.

In EC2 and OpenStack cloud environments user data can be passed to the cloud instance to customize the cloud instance on the first boot. But what if your virtual machine doesn’t run in the cloud environment? In this article we’re going to configure our virtual machines with user data regardless if they’re running in the cloud or not.

Do you care about how your Git commits look like? A great software practitioner does, indeed. Let’s review a couple of basic tips for developers that make the Git commit log look good and teamwork with Git source control more fun.