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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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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