Archive for January, 2010

When is it time to move on?

January 22nd, 2010

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:

  1. Stay and possibly take on a different role.
  2. 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.

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Service Component Architecture

January 13th, 2010

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.

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Posted in programming, technology

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Brief Encounter

January 12th, 2010

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.

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