Opportunities to Learn
Coffee and philosophy, why not? I really miss some of the public areas to have coffee and commiserate with colleagues, since I don’t have that at my site now. If you read that recent article about Stevie Jobs — public areas breed innovation and cross pollination. I try my best.
Recently I had two talks with colleagues; the two whom sit more on the side of operations/support/development vs. myself — as I consider myself a pure developer. And two discussions ensued.
Quality Is Practice
First, pointing out that there was very little test coverage in a code base I was working on; the lack of tests had caused repeated failures in code releases because new code would break old code. What about Sonar? And Tools? Fine and dandy but —
“quality and testing are PRACTICE, not tools.” To that statement I got an “I suppose” and disbelieve. The two do not write tests for their code.
Quality Is Persistent Discipline
Second, I was asked about my development environment — java and maven questions in specificity. Having went through the effin setup grinder with development environments for over 20 years, I told the colleague how I st up. A directory with all my jdks, mavens, servers, and ides. I zip up/back up my IDE setups and everything is portable/configurable with environment variable. Even at home (and working on this in the EC Tech Meetup) I use virtual images to set up development setups.
“Time consuming.” He said. I couldn’t believe he used the network nerd installed images/JRE for DEVELOPMENT? I had worked with him before and remember always being at his desk . . .
You have to be persistently disciplined to code. In Java, over half the stuff is configuration — if you can’t repeatedly set up your environment from scratch it you WILL get burned when those network image folks roll out a security patch and wipe your environment or registry. It’ll happen.
In the late 90s I purchased a notebook computer jsut for that thing. Frequently onsite you’d be waiting a month to get set up –unproductive.
Every Challenge is a Chance To Learn
Recently I have had these following things thrown onto my plate:
-Scalable configurations
-Application security
-Code Quality
These popped up out of nowhere as issues. But, well, I don’t get to directly work on them at work so I do it in my off time. The most fascinating thing I am doing now with my work on virtualizing development environments is to do security code scans with open source software like LAPSE+. This well become more prevalent in our near future. And writing faster applications with canned stacks — faster prototype to enterprise.
If you are in a meeting and something that doesn’t involve you directly perks your interest, pursue it right now and learn something. Just spike it out. The hands on EC Meetups are all about that. Function and practice.