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
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!
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.
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.
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 
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