Meetings Greetings – ECTech Future
Last I was here I was chugging through some examples in my Eatup on a few different JVM related languages. Went well.
So after that I dropped the ECTech Meetup subscription, it was not fruitful and the tech scene had gotten taken over in my area by non-Java lovers doing things that don’t pertain to my existence. It’s fine an dandy to do what you wish, but inside the small exosphere of a smaller city is tough to not have “The Grand Unified String Theory of All Techies” at hand, so decided to swim a bit further out into the surf and see if there are any larger waves and less single-minded beaches. I guess I miss the Twin Cities’ diversified atmosphere in many cases, such is the work of a devotee remotee. That said, I am soon starting up a newer group, more social-media oriented and probably geared towards us ruralites — there is a lot to learn about remote work and staying highly tuned as experienced developers and quality lifestyle. Note: until recently I have been as urban as they come since the late 1980’s — south side of Chicago and urban St. Paul MN. One of the biggest impediments is no access to any Indian food whatsoever . . .
The company I am currently hitched to has some cool things going on and its been fun and I have engrossed myself. We are linked to an SAP project and they really take Spring configs to their ultimate bloody end. I didn’t think I’d be writing XML configs like this still, but am, and they still have their graces. But as is usual, code generators can be problematic for the non-NOOBS — things like generated DTO’s that don’t let you do Jackson-like notations to manipulate them more fine-grained. Still though, a business gives an engineer a palate to be creative around their needs in ways you may have never thought; anyone who can sit for 10 hours staring into code should be excited at the times we live in now.
Most recently, having had been Enterprise for so long (meaning large teams on large software in large companies), I’ve gotten to work with some embedded developers and small project developers without Enterprise experience. It has rekindled my desire at times to be in full control of code, full ownership, on my own projects I have neglected. I am excited for them, and for anyone thinking about device programming or small microservice style programming. Just remember — because it’s *yours* does not mean ignore software basics on deployment, code quality, tooling, continuous integration, refactoring and patterns. So in many ways this blog is my *small* outlet. Not to be reductionist, but doing Agile coding you really don’t get to see the big picture, just a jeweler’s glass on one piece of the puzzle; and that can be dissatisfying at times. (On the other hand — Enterprise means BIG toys and I love that a well, and I love people in general.)
Kotlin. Java. I keep seeing Kotlin buzz. I used to see Go buzz. I lived through Groovy buzz though still use it and Grails for small testing scenarios and prototyping. Java is not going anywhere. As annoying as their lambda implementation has been to me, and streams, someone will always have to use something like it to make service busses etc. C++ has went nowhere, nor Java, and C# fitting in much of that same sphere.
http://nomad.so/2015/03/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-to-intelligent-programmers/
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/07/01/1840213/is-rubys-decline-in-popularity-permanent
Please don’t consider me a Java fan boy — the reason I chose it (over my then-dual skillset of MFC/VB and java) was that all the ideas were coming from Java and open source. Knock off the old outrageous per-cpu licensing WebSphere, ATG Dynamo and BEA used to charge (slain by Tomcat and JBoss) and the world of Agile, XP, testing etc. were all pushed light years ahead in the open source world; to me meant Java.
Process. I still look at process, and the genesis of Agile as top-down from grassroots is complete. Meh. Maybe an observation here and there.
I find this interesting as well and will be pursing reproduction of the tests soon, being more interested in the lost art of slim, performing code:
Keep in mind for my approach — IDEAS trump TOOLS. CRAFT trumps ORTHODOXY.
UI on the other hand. JavaScript. CSS – Less, SCSS etc. I still see the same things going wrong as I have for the last 15 years. Maybe it’s the nature of the beast — UI means UX means needing lots of churn and feedback. But the turnover of the code generators; the “this is a better MVC/dependency library” — name it. I am not involved in any consortium but the work is as tedious as ever and imho hasn’t gotten any better. There is a lot of art involved in coding it, and without pattern training, or testing or code principles rigorously applied become time suck and error prone.
So getting back, will be posting some more solutions as I come across them like before and see where that leads.
Ciao for now!