Meng Lin

Tech advocate of good engineering practices and new technologies

Passing Params to Template in XSL

Recently, I am lucky enough to work on some XSL transforms for a legacy system. In turns out my programming skills have little use in this new found arena, even passing params around proves to be a pain. In case there are more lucky fellas out there, here's some recipes...


Manage Java Version on Unix/Linux

As many would have experienced, Java version is one of the most common problem when developing software, and probably the most painful type. Especially if you have legacy projects written in Java 7, while you want to take advantages of what Java 8 has to offer, switching between versions is...


When Should You Refactor?

Refactoring code is a tricky business. Doing it too early, you are simply creating work which may or may not be needed. Doing it too late, you end up with a bunch of spaghetti code, which is a right pain in the neck to work with. I am going to...


The Million Dollar Cock-up

When it comes to making a mess of IT systems, there is simply no bottom line. Amongst the places I've worked for, I have seen developers making cock-ups ranging from mis-calculation in accountant reports, deleting TBs of data from production database, and recently open sourcing GitHub repos with AWS user...


Walk This Way, Ep.1

This time, I am going to use a series of blogs, based on a 2-month project my team has done within Platform team at the BBC, to showcase a couple of good engineering practices, some bits and bots about using Scala and Play framework, and reflect on what we could...