Infoq posted a nice presentation by Gregor Hohpe, where he talks about SOA. For him domain specific languages could be an answer to over complicated general languages like BPEL.
Also if you havent done so read his article about starbucks and the two phase commit: a very nice analogy about asynchronous communication in a real world example.
Often forgotten because most of the time you want to proove that your code runs. Yes I know we all tend to be lazy. But to be complete in a sense of Sir Carl Popper you also have to falsify your assumption. You are forced to think about deeper about what your code does and what it should not do. But even further you proove that exceptions are treated correct in case of an error or worse like it happened to me it gets swallowed. I was about to refactor an ancient piece of software written in the early days of Java development. I wrote a test for a new feature and was happy to see my test was successfull. But writing a failure test I recognized that every exception was swallowed by an nice try {} catch (Exception) block just because this test failed.
It happend to me again. Today I found myself in a new project where everything seems to go wrong. The climate is non productive, they have sitting 12 developers, where I guess 2 or 3 good ones can do the same job. They have absolutly no unit tests, no build server, no documatation, neither external nor within code, no code reviews, a lot of changing developers, an over complicated build system which doesnt work, too much code which is solved by open source libraries, and so on. If you work like this you get used to it, but if you know there is a much different way there is only one way: you have to tell. The decision is as always between leave this as soon as possible or try to change, which of course is much harder. But this depends on the situation, as long as there is enough money nobody cares. Its easier to convice them if they realize its a case of surving.
Okay, so it’s been a while without any post. I’ve been rather busy lately with Rails stuff and getting new gigs, which isn’t easy. I’ll post about both soon. Both can be fun and a little annoying. But both pay off in their ways ;)
Also, summer is quite hot this year in Berlin. We have like 30 degress (Celsius) every day for quite a few weeks now. While I enjoy that (although I miss the Byron Bay surf beach), it’s definitely too warm to do much in the evenings after work. So I rather enjoy nice, warm evenings after spending the whole day in the office.
I’ll keep you posted. Cheers.
The last weeks have been rather exciting for me. Got to work a lot on a Rails project, and if it’s possible, got to love Rails even more. Got to play with a lot of its features, and there’s more to come. RJS templates are especially great things. Having the client-side code on the server-side in the server’s language is excellent stuff. O’Reilly just published a nice PDF book about RJS. Good stuff and well worth checking out.
Testing with Rails rocks. It takes some coding before I even turn to the browser for testing the GUI stuff, and then mostly to test the interaction of the implemented things. The rest is nicely implemented as tests.
Anyway, it’s been a lot of fun, and it’ll keep me busy for some time still. I don’t miss Java at all, implementing stuff in Rails is way more helping in focussing on the future in general. It’s great to do something completely different from what I did for the last two and a half years. Not that I completely dislike Java now, but it’s just great to completely delve into something new to learn it as best as possible. Having good Rails experience might turn out to be a good investment ;)
So far, freelancing has been sweet for me. Got my own office, and summer’s finally arrived in Germany. Which is all not to say that freelancing might turn out bad, I’m very aware of that, but so far I still think it was the right thing to do for me.
What sucks is that my MacBook Pro 17″ arrived last Friday and was only 10 minutes after unpacking ready to be declared DOA (dead on arrival). New one’s been ordered, but hopefully I don’t have to wait for another four weeks. I got to play with it for some time, and it just kicks butt. Spring builds in seconds, Eclipse starts in seconds, too. Just awesome. Amazing display, great sound, screaming fast. Oh, well.
Technorati Tags:
2006, getting real, rails, ruby on rails, freelancing
In case you didn’t notice, today’s National Day of Slayer, the 6/6/06. So you might wanna put on some life-negating music (Slayer, of course), and listen to it loudly and proudly all day long. And I’ll just sit here waiting for Satan himself to deliver my MacBook Pro ;).
Thursday was my last day at my regular job. Felt kind of weird, but it felt good. I won’t delve into details too much here, but I don’t regret it. The future is too exciting right now. Working with Rails for a living (to a certain extent) is great. Good to know that I’ll be working with it for the next couple of weeks or even months. Geoffrey Grosenbach (of Ruby on Rails Podcast fame) just wrote an article for O’Reilly Ruby about working fulltime with Rails. Good stuff.
While I can’t wait to get into my new office, it’s nice to have some time at home and in my Kiez (the Boxi on the linked Wikipedia page), especially on a nice spring day with a lot of sun on the balcony.
As a nice reward for the end of my normal day job, I ordered the shiny and new 17″ MacBook Pro. Can’t wait to get my hands on it. Hopefully IDEA will ride fast as lightning on it. Some speed is very appropriate after spending almost two and a half years on my first generation iBook G4.
I also signed up for RailsConf Europe in London. Really looking forward to this, because I’ve never been to a conference before, and because I’ve never been to London before. An 8-hour stay at Heathrow waiting for a flight to Melbourne probably doesn’t count.
For the soon-to-be-founded company I’m thinking about writing a small CRM tool in Rails. I’ve looked at SugarCRM and friends, but it’s too bad that all those tools are way overbloated for smaller companies or freelancers. If you know anything smaller, let me know. The 37signals guys apparently are working on something, but nobody knows a release date. Well, if worse comes to worst I’ll get some more Rails experience and maybe release it as a small open source project ;)
Technorati Tags:
ruby, macosx, idea, rails, ruby on rails
It’s been a while since the last post, but a lot has happened for me since then. I’ve taken the plunge and quit my day job. I spent some time thinking down in Australia, and shortly afterwards decided that the time has come for me. I needed a new perspective in my professional life, and I think I found it. I’ll become a freelance developer beginning with June. I’m not looking forward to sitting in a coffee house all day, but to get to work on more interesting (pressing thumbs) projects. It seems to be in order that my first project is a Rails one. I haven’t done web development in a while, having been more on the server-side of J2EE things lately, but it’s fun, and I get back into the web game pretty quickly.
Over the last two and a half years after leaving the university, I definitely learned a lot, mostly stuff that you don’t get to learn in school, of course. And now it’s time to use that knowledge for different things and for myself.
Is it scary? A little. No safety net through a regular income, more responsibilities, accounting, digging up projects, working overtime (duh!), sometimes maybe not working at all. There’s some risk to consider, but I think it’s worth it. The though of it has been scratching an itch over the last year, and lately, the itching has been almost unbearable, so I gave my notice and quit. And that felt amazingly good, and right.
So if you need good Java or Rails man-power in or around Berlin (Germany), let me know.
More to come.
Six weeks off are a nice time-frame to get a lot of stuff out of your head, and make room for new stuff. And, in Australia, you get to see a lot of great stuff as well. But what’s amazing every time I don’t touch a computer for several weeks, is that you really don’t miss as much as you’d think. Life in IT might be fast in general, but you won’t miss out on much in a few weeks. Always an eye opener.
So it’s back to business now, but a lot of good stuff to remember and the best tan in years. Check out the pics at Flickr, if you like ;)
I just ordered POJOs in Action, looks very promising. Something nice to read after reading a lot of fictional books.
The new year is still young, so it’s still reasonable to find some things to be done this year, a.k.a. new years resolutions.
* Improve project management skills. Still a lot to do on this one, but I’m on my way. Improving communication, delegation, and stuff like that are top items. Stephen Seay’s list is a great basis for getting better at this stuff. Hard to come up with anything more. Well, maybe, but a year is only 365 days long.
* Take more notes of things learned. It’s easy to forget stuff, and reflecting oneself, the team, problems, successes and failures is an important part of improving.
* Get going with Ruby on Rails. I postponed reworking my personal homepage with Rails because after ten to twelve hours of work I didn’t really have the urge to think about other stuff during the little free time I had left. But Ruby is a beautiful language, and Rails is a wonderful framework, so that’s definitely something I want to do this year.
* Catch up on what I’ve missed out regarding CSS and HTML. Being a former web developer I spent two years ignoring the current trends in web development. I’m not exclusively speaking of Web 2.0 stuff here. I don’t want to deal with frames or deeply nested tables anymore, so it’s time to pick up where I left off. May the Zen of CSS be with me.
* Delve into the details of the JVM. Java’s popularity might be declining, but the concept of its JVM sure isn’t. And I’ll be using Java for a considerable amount of time in the future anyway. This one is inspired by Chad Fowler’s “My Job Went to India”.
* Spread out the vacation across the year. Up until now I only took larger vacations to travel to Australia or New Zealand. As a developer that wasn’t really a problem for me. The stress level was alright, and four to six weeks were enough to refresh and come back with an urge to get stuff done. But over the last months as a project manager I realized that it’s important to take time off more often, even if only for a weekend in a different city, the countryside, or whatever.
* Spend more time with friends. Well, this should be a no-brainer, but it’s frighteningly easy to loose track of friends, if you don’t spend time with them. Career is not everything. But nonetheless, a nice and long trip to Australia is up first.
* Read! It’s time to read some books dealing with projects in general again. “The Art of Project Management”, “Mythical Man-Month” and “Death March” are on top of the list. New books will include “Applied Software Project Management”, and something dealing with business.
Doesn’t seem like too much, but we’ll see how it goes.
Technorati Tags:
2006, resolutions