February 23rd, 2010 by Ludovic
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Photo not factual!
I have been considering buying a car for a few months now. For one reason or another I kept delaying it. Money was of course one of the key reasons. That said I was not looking at very cheap cars. But after much internal debate here I am, the owner of a car, for the first time! Today I bought the road tax and sorted out the insurance (ouch!). All in all it is not cheap to own a car but it gives one such a feeling of freedom. I was so frustrated at relying on public transport to do my grocery shopping that I, in fact, wasn’t doing it. Now I can bring myself to going to the shopping center to get food. I am also looking forward to going outside of London on weekend trips. I haven’t been to Scotland yet. Definitely one destination high on my list.
February 8th, 2010 by Ludovic
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As mentioned in my previous post, I have been considering moving on from my current job for a little while. And I realised now was probably the right time for such a move. After looking for a few months I have found a new position. I am really excited about the opportunity to learn about and discover a new work environment and I think this move will be a great experience. However, it will be sad to say goodbye to the people I have been working with for several years. Only a few weeks to go.
January 22nd, 2010 by Ludovic
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It is easy to find yourself in a comfortable situation when you have been in the same place for a while. You are used to how things work and you don’t need to make much effort anymore. Comfort and stability are nice but they can lead to complacency. And in any technology-focussed environment – or any fast-changing environment for that matter – it can then lead you to becoming obsolete. So the question I ask myself is when is it the right time to move on?
I have been working in the same company for over four years now. I have tremendously enjoyed the first three years. The last one has been more challenging. Having considered my options I am faced with two choices:
- Stay and possibly take on a different role.
- Or move on and take on a new challenge altogether.
When I have to make important decisions I always try weighing the pros and cons of each option against the other ones. In this particular instance there are a few reasons why I should stay, not least of all being that I have had the chance to progress so much during my time there. This, however, is balance out by the fact that I don’t feel I am learning so much anymore. And if I don’t get intellectually challenged I lose motivation. Lack of motivation can too lead you to complacency. Plus, as one of my friends says, a change is a good as a break. And I could use a break right about now.
So, when is it time to move on? Well, if you are lucky enough to have options – which is a luxury in these difficult times – and you have become a bit too comfortable it is probably time to look for a new challenge. That is the line of reasoning I have followed up to now in my career and it has so far always worked out. So with that in mind I know what I have to do.
January 13th, 2010 by Ludovic
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Today, Fabric3 announced the general availability of their latest SCA implementation. Although I have heard the term before I have never taken the time to read further on the subject so this morning I decided to change that. This introduction to SCA by David Chappel does a good job at providing an overview of what Service Component Architecture is about.
In essence there is nothing revolutionary about SCA. In my view, it is an effort to standardise how services and their interactions are defined in a technology-agnostic manner. Anyone who has been developing enterpise applications using the Spring Framework or OSGi should be pretty familiar the concepts in SCA.
At the core of SCA are Services. Services are implementated using Components. Components can be composed (Composites) to provide more refined behaviours. All of these components and compositions of components live within a Domain. Interactions between these services are expressed as References. The actual communication between components is left to the responsibily of Bindings, thus isolating the business logic from the underlying remoting technology. The SCA runtime is responsible for dependency injections so services need not concern themselves with locating dependencies. Finally, the use of annotations and xml configurations mean that services/components can be implemented as simple objects.
Besides Fabric3, there’s another open-source SCA implemention from Apache called Tuscani.
I’m quite curious to see how practical/useful this architecture is. Hopefully I’ll find the time to experiment with one of these implementations.
January 12th, 2010 by Ludovic
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This morning I was waiting for the bus on my way to work (rather later than usual) and a lady in a her late 40s or early 50s (by my own estimation) arrived seconds later. She started talking to me very naturally, which in large cities like London is not that usual. Within minutes she had already told me she had been diagnosed with cancer over a year ago and was on her way to the hospital to most likely be told she needed another major surgery.
I felt very sorry for this seemlingly very nice lady. It never is easy to go through these sorts of situation. Thankfully she has relatives living near by to help her along the way. I was also amazed at her ability to talk about a very personal topic to a complete stranger with such ease. I suppose she was anxious before going to the hospital and needed to talk about it.
At the end of our bus journey we both wished each other good luck and went our separate ways.
When I feel sorry for myselft because things are tough and don’t always work out Life has a way to remind me that, in fact, all these little annoyances are not important. On the contrary, I am lucky to be in my situation. Not everyone can say the same.
December 23rd, 2009 by Ludovic
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Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.
- Frederick Brooks
The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.
- Bjarne Stroustrup
The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.
- C.A.R. Hoare
December 20th, 2009 by Ludovic
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Here we are again. One more year has come and gone. With 2010 only a couple of weeks away I could, like last year and the year before, make a list of the most notable events of 2009. This time, however, I will not. You know how people say that it is when things are hard that you learn the most. Well, suffice to say that a fair amount of learning was accomplished this year.
Next year, there are a few things I would like to concentrate on. First, I would like to be more present for my family. I have been shying away from my responsibilities (as a son, as a brother and as an uncle) for a while but this is not very fair to them. Second, I would like to find extra-curricular activities I can invest myself in. Maybe something which could also be useful to others. I also want to lead a healthier life – a recurring theme – : sleep more, eat better and exercise regularly.
Let’s see how long my new year’s resolutions last for. But for now Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
December 14th, 2009 by Ludovic
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When I started writing a blog I felt a little uneasy about it. Exposing my private life for everyone to see was not something very natural. Then I realised that although accessible to anyone there were – and still are - actually very few people, if any, reading my blog. That made things easier. These days, I write mostly for myself. Just now, I was going through some very old posts of mine. This is what I like about blogging. It allows one to capture one’s thoughts and feelings at certain points in time. And to be able to go back and read them. It’s a bit like being able to travel in time.
Back then I seemed to be most prolific in the early hours of the morning. Looking at the time now (1:56 am) it doesn’t look like this has changed much.
December 8th, 2009 by Ludovic
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Continuous Integration systems are nowadays a requisite for any half-decent software development outfit. There are many CI solutions available, some open source and some commercial. Over the years I have come across and used different ones: CruiseControl, Hudson and Bamboo. CruiseControl is highly versatile and works well but it is a pain to set up and maintain, especially in large teams where projects get added and modified regularly. Hudson works pretty and has an active follower base contributing many plugins. But I have to say Bamboo is my favourite thus far. It works a treat, scales well with remote build agents and the web interface is user friendly. Plus this is the one I use at work so I am very familiar with it. The only down side is the cost.
I have been setting up my own dev tool set at home so I can work on my own projects. What I need now is a CI tool. I was looking for comparisons between the various options and I came across this page on the ThoughtWorks wiki:
http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/CI+Feature+Matrix
It is a very comprehensive comparison matrix and it seems to be updated frequently.
I’m still not sure which one I will go for…answer in the next post.
December 6th, 2009 by Ludovic
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The latest addition to my collection of toys is an Apple MacMini Server. The reason I decided to throw a new server into the mix is that I wanted to have the ability to develop and run my own applications as well as experiment with new technologies. For a while I was using my 2-year old Mac Mini as a server but with only 1Gb of RAM and a mere 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU it didn’t really cut it. I now use it to watch TV and movies in my room. It works a treat. So now here is what my home steup looks like (click on the image to zoom in):
From the NAS I run an SVN server where I keep my home projects. On the MMS I have installed Tomcat, PostgreSQL and I’ve just deployed Atlassian Confluence (they offer a starter kit for only $10) so I have a central location where I can keep all the information I need.
And by using DynDNS I can have all of this accessible on the internet. I route all the traffic to the MMS and with Apache I proxy the Confluence requests to Tomcat and SVN requests to the NAS.
It’s a pretty cool setup which gives plenty of things to occupy myself with 
.
