I've chosen the title of this blog post very deliberately because I want people who are looking for fair trade coffee in the Sydney CBD to be able to find something when they search Google for it.

I started working in the city a week ago, and one of my first tasks has been to find a coffee shop that sells fair trade coffee. Of course, there are the big chains, including Starbucks, which incidentally is participating in fair trade fortnight in May, and Jamaica Blue, with its fair trade blend. But neither of those is really that close to my office, and I've never really liked the coffee from the big chains as much as I do from the small cafes. So I did a search in Google to see what I could find.

I was quite disappointed. I couldn't find any lists of cafes anywhere, apart from the Oxfam website, and the Fair Trade Association website. And the only cafes in the CBD they had were Starbucks and Jamaica Blue.

After searching a little harder, I found the voodoo coffee company, which supplies a number of cafes in the Sydney CBD, and they have a fair trade blend. I've emailed them asking them which stores they sell fair trade coffee to, but I read that on occasion, Pulse Cafe on Kent Street (right near my work) has sold the fair trade blend.

Does anyone know of any other cafes in the Sydney CBD that sell fair trade coffee?

Update

In many software development teams that I've worked on, code reviews are done by printing out the code to be reviewed. This is in turn read and scribbled on with red ink by developers suffering from a delusion that their coding standard is better than mine. An example of some such code:

public boolean equals(Object o)
{
   try
   {
      if (Calendar.getInstance().get(Calendar.MONTH) == 1
            && Calendar.getInstance().get(Calendar.DATE) == 29)
      {
         return true;
      }
      else
      {
         Thread.sleep(10000);
         return new Random().nextBoolean();
      }
   }
   catch (Throwable t)
   {
      // Something must have gone wrong, try again
      return new Random().nextBoolean();
   }
}

When reading the above code, the obvious problem that jumps out is that it contains no less than ten curly braces. When printed for a code review, this is a waste of valuable ink. The squids of the world have been working overtime to provide the ink needed to print out all the code that needs to be reviewed, it is about time we gave them a break. I'd therefore like to propose to the JSR-666 expert group an extension that curly braces be replaced with significant whitespace.

The previous code example would become:

public boolean equals(Object o)
   try
      if (Calendar.getInstance().get(Calendar.MONTH) == 1
            && Calendar.getInstance().get(Calendar.DATE) == 29)
         return true;
      else
         Thread.sleep(10000);
         return new Random().nextBoolean();
   catch (Throwable t)
      // Something must have gone wrong, try again
      return new Random().nextBoolean();

A fine piece of code that would pass any code review.

This feature will also solve a number of other problems, for example, it will eliminate the age old argument over whether braces belong on a newline or not. It will also force developers to write neatly structured code.

This feature will not require any JVM changes, but will require compiler changes. Existing code may need to be changed, however, if the existing code was well formatted to begin with, it should suffice to simply run the following command in vim:

:%s/\{|\}//g