A Change of Pace

It has been a while since I last posted anything up on my blog (apparently when IBM laid me off) so I'm starting to sense a bit of a trend here. :)

Since my last post I got a job with a couple of great friends at Mediaport Entertainment doing .NET development starting with Silverlight and ASP.NET. It has been a really great experience to get back into .NET from Java and I've had lots of fun picking up the many ways C# has changed from its early Java-clone days. We've been working on the next version of our web store and I helped decide that we should move away from Silverlight and ASP.NET to give ASP.NET MVC a try. It has been a great experience learning web development with this platform and I'm excited to keep building my skills in web development and learning Javascript / jQuery.

But now I'm moving to a new company that I'm really excited about. Extend Health is where I've decided to move to now and I am really looking forward to starting there. They have a great team of developers, many of them Neumont graduates. I'll still be doing .NET and ASP.NET MVC development but I feel I'm going to have a great time learning from all the developers there.

And to finish off Extend Health was the first company I've had an interview where I was asked to build a web app and on the next interview we would discuss it. I have to say I love that idea for an interview so much better than whiteboarding a simple linked list implementation!

Time for a Change

This Monday has proven to be an interesting one. I arrived at work in the morning and managed to start getting into a productive groove, which can be difficult on a Monday, only to have everything flopped upside down by lunch. I had a meeting with my manager and found out that I've been part of a Resource Action (IBM-speak for layoff) so as of March 1st I am back on the market for a new job. Even though I was aware something like this might come up I have to admit I'm still trying to get my head around what has happened. My first job and also my first layoff... Live and learn I suppose.

I've had a lot of fun at IBM and I've really had a great learning experience of life inside a company as big as IBM. Going straight from school to IBM was daunting to me but I feel really great that I have accomplished something for myself. I've met some really great people that I hope to keep in contact with once I find a new job. So as my time with IBM has come to an end I am looking forward anxiously to the next thing for me to work on. Thanks for all the good times IBM!

Now that all that is out of the way, if you happen to be hiring or know anyone who may be hiring I'd love to hear from you! :-) You can find me on LinkedIn or check my Stack Overflow CV.

Learning Scala pt 1: First Impressions

My first foray into learning Scala with the help of O'Reilly's Learning Scala, and the interwebs. I'll be posting things as I learn them in a way to help cement my understanding of the language and so if I'm wrong, people can call me on it.

As a Java programmer, I've been very interested in watching all the languages that are beginning to spring up around the JVM. From JRuby, Jython, Groovy, Clojure, and Scala they've all been interesting to watch take the JVM to new heights beyond Java. So far, I've been mostly interested in languages started on the JVM (though JRuby and Jython look nice) since they are designed from the ground up to take advantage of the vast number of Java libraries in a natural way.

My first dabble was with Groovy which takes many of its ideas from Ruby, but can still be written in a very Java-centric way. Specifically, Groovy was written to be more of a superset of Java including duck typing and Closures into the mix and letting you write applications much more quickly and concisely than one could in Java. Unfortunately I haven't really played with Groovy much recently but it seems like it would be a great JVM-based glue language or for writing up a quick prototype.

Scala has been drawing me in over the past couple weeks and feels like it could be a full replacement language for Java where with Groovy it felt like an additional tool in my Java workbench. After reading Chapter 1 of Learning Scala here are my impressions of Scala thus far:

Functional and Object Oriented

From the start Scala mixes both functional aspects (much of which still confuse my Object Oriented mind so far), and Object Oriented programming. We have Classes and inheritance but also have pattern matching and Actors.

Less Verbose than Java

Scala, like many other languages, is less verbose than Java in several ways. First, there is no need for the semicolon (in most cases), or even for return statements of methods. Scala will usually handle these things for you, so a method foo, that adds two numbers, could be written like this:

def foo = { 1 + 1 }

Which returns an Integer.

A nice feature of Scala is that you can choose to specifically type your variables or let Scala figure that out. In Scala, the type comes after the variable name to make it easy to parse when the variable is not typed.

Strange at First

As a Java programmer I've gotten pretty used to how things are with Java so beginning to learn Scala has left a few parts of my mind that stick out.

Method Names

Scala is much more flexible in what a method name can be, this includes these characters to name a few: "+,-,<,>,*,/,?,!". This seemed very unnatural to me coming from Java where this is not possible. This also is confusing because it looks like operator overloading but actually isn't operator overloading, these are method names, so one could define a "+" method or a ">" method and be perfectly fine with Scala.

This will definitely take some getting used to but I think it could be very handy especially when the need for a DSL arises.

No static keyword

With Java, declaring a class-level variable is as easy as tacking the static keyword to it. With Scala, there is no static keyword, instead, for class level variables you use the object keyword instead of class.

class foo() {         
    // Instance variables go here 
}

object foo() {         
    // Class level variables go here
}

Overall Scala isn't too different from Java on first glance. While there certainly will be more differences, it is easy enough for me to start jumping in and playing around with Scala.

test

trying out some code formatting

JCP Death spiral or "Normal for a Maturing Language"

140 characters wasn't enough to write my thoughts down on Stephen Colebourne's blog post about the JCP I came across via @snoopdave. Since I live in Java land I've thought a lot about the JCP, Java, and how things will be once Oracle absorbs Sun. No one really knows what Oracle may, or may not do with Java and the JCP but one thing I'm certain of is that things are changing whether Oracle does anything about it or not.

I've been following the long saga between The Apache Software Foundation and the Sun over Apache Harmony for a while now and there are definitely problems with the JCP that need to be resolved. Colebourne's post shows the declining trend in numbers of JSRs submitted to the JCP and brings up the question as to whether this is a sign of the times for the JCP or something normal for a maturing language such as Java.

I think the answer is a bit of both. As Colebourne points out, his chart only includes new JSRs and not ones that are in maintenance mode or being updated, such as Java EE 6 for example (which connects about 30 other JSRs, most of which are not new). Since Java is a large platform that has been around for quite some time now that seems very normal to me from a mature language.

The other part I'm starting to see comes more from how other standards outside of Java come about. To me, the JCP often is done in a backwards sort of manner where the spec is defined before any real code has been written. EJB is a good example of a spec that was very complicated and had to go through several painful revisions (Ask Java devs about EJB 2), before we started to see a push to make the spec simpler (EJB3). This sort of spec first code later attitude seems to be challenged more and more by the rough code, general consensus crowd. A couple of good examples that come to mind are Spring and OSGi which both came about outside of the JCP and both now have JCP experience in different ways.

Rod Johnson of Spring also believes in rough code, general consensus when he wrote about his and Spring Source's approach to the JCP. This move towards proving technologies and techniques before submitting a JSR is something we will see happen more and more as Java progresses. JSR330 - Dependency Injection for Java, is a good example of this happening. JSR330 combines the knowledge learned from Spring and Guice to define some basic annotations for Dependency Injection in Java.

In the end, I'm glad to see fewer JSRs being submitted and giving more time for techniques and technologies to adapt and mature before working through the JCP to define a standard. Now all we need to do is get more people to experiment with closures and reified Generics...

Impressive = KeyJnote

I'm glad to see that KeyJNote has returned as Impressive. A while ago it seemed like KeyJNote had fallen off the face of the earth, but now its back with a new name. I'll have to try it out some more now that I can find it again.

Ubuntu on a Stick

I got a Patriot Xporter 32Gb thumb drive for Christmas and I finally got around to installing Ubuntu 8.10 on it. This was my first experience with installing any Linux distro on a thumb drive and booting from USB so it has been an interesting experience, here is what I encountered when trying to get my thumb drive working.

8.10 USB Startup Disk Creator

Of course, the first place I started was the USB Startup Disk Creator, which has been available since Ubuntu 8.04. The process is simple:

• Popped in my USB drive.
• Went to System>Administration>Create a USB Startup Disk
• Selected my USB drive and selected the option "Stored in reserved extra space"
• Adjusted the extra space slider to the full 32 Gb
• Clicked "Make startup disk"

Easy.... and slow. It took a pretty good amount of time for the drive to be completely setup. Nothing too bad, but enough to get up and find something else to do for a while. Unfortunately something went wrong in the process or my laptop is messed up (which it could possibly be). When I restarted my computer and selected the USB drive as the primary boot device, I would only get that the drive was corrupted. I tried to troubleshoot the problem and also tried to recreate the startup disk to no avail.

I'm not sure what happened, but I'm pretty sure its something on my end (perhaps the USB drive) and not that of the USB Startup Disk creator. Fortunately, I found an alternative method that I did get working for me.

UNetbootin to the rescue

While searching around for clues to my problems from the startup disk creator, I ran across UNetbootin so I decided I'd give it a try. Here are the steps I took with UNetbootin:

• Downloaded and started UNetboontin on my XP laptop.
• Downloaded the Ubuntu 8.10 iso - (I actually already had an iso on the laptop, doh)
• Selected my Distro - Ubuntu 8.10
• Checked Disk Image and pointed UNetboontin to the Intrepid iso
• Selected my USB drive as the device to be installed to
• Pressed ok and sat back

The UNetbootin process was extremely easy to follow and it seemed to me that it took less time to format the disk and get the USB drive set up. After I finished, I rebooted XP and switched the boot device to USB again. This time it dropped right into the Ubuntu live menu where I started Ubuntu right up. Success! Both methods were extremely easy to use and weren't very time consuming.

Ubuntu from a thumb drive

Ubuntu takes quite a while to boot up from my thumb drive, but once it does its very responsive and quite fun to work with. Unfortunately you don't want to do too much disk intensive work since it seems like the writes are a little on the slow side, but bearable. Its been really fun to set up my own portable Ubuntu install with a decent amount of storage. In the coming months I'll try running the portable install on several computers to get a feel for how actually portable it is. For now though, I've been very pleased with the results and I look forward to using this as my portable Linux haven from now on.

This also has prompted me to consider picking up a couple 4 Gb thumb drives so I won't have to burn another install disk. I hate having so many piles of CD-Rs with different distros on it when I could just slap it on a thumb drive and go. (unless I can't boot from USB, but thats besides the point) So congrats to the Ubuntu team on a lovely tool as well as the Fedora team who helped motivate the Ubuntu team to improve their USB install tools as well.

Education in Software Development

Computer Science just isn't hard enough.


Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software puts it plainly enough, but he isn't the only one who thinks CS courses need a change. Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame recently did an interview with Datamation discussing Educating Software Developers. As a student, I became very interested in how computer science courses could be changed along with different approaches that could be taken. Bjarne Stroustrup, unlike many in academia, has a strong background in commercial software development. Academia has been producing graduates who are unprepared to enter the world of a working software developer because computer science courses are not designed to help produce great software developers.

So how has my education affected me?

I graduated from Neumont University, a private, for-profit school that offers a Bacherlor of Science in Computer Science degree. Neumont's curriculum was created by Graham Doxey, Scott McKinley, and Marlow Einelund as a response to the growing demand for qualified CS graduates. Neumont attempts to fill the gap that many computer science courses create when a student graduates. New graduates often have little to no working knowledge of programming in the software development industry. Neumont's project-based curriculum teaches students early on how to work in teams to accomplish a goal.

The project-based teaching style at Neumont is what attracted me to the school.

So what did I like about Neumont's approach and what could be improved now that I've had some working experience with software development? Lets start out with what Neumont does right.

Project-based Learning

Serious programming is a team sport.

Bjarne Stroustrup emphasizes that serious programming is not done individually, it is done as a team, often working with other teams to accomplish a goal. Project-based learning helps teach students how to interact with other team members in an effective team dynamic.

Neumont's project-based curriculum works great in this aspect. From the very first quarter I started, I was working in at least one team to accomplish a programming goal. The course curriculum starts with small team projects and begins to add more and more responsibility to the teams as the students progress. By the time students are seniors, you are working most of your time in a group on projects. The Enterprise Project aspect places these groups inside real companies such as IBM, Novell, and EDS.

Business Skills

Project-based learning also helps Neumont emphasize the business side of software development. Working in teams allows us to learn how to communicate better among our our teams, other teams, and our teachers. Skills we need to learn how to function on a team come with experience. With each project we attempted, we learned how to work as a team and manage all the "soft" issues that come with teamwork.

There were teams that were great, and we learned how a well-gelled team comes together to produce great results. There were dysfunctional teams, where no one got along with each other and the project floundered. There was the prodigy programmer who obsessively controlled all their code and re-wrote any code he had to touch that wasn't written by him. There was the lazy teammate, the ever-late teammate, and your indecisive teammates. Each type I encountered helped me learn ways to work to keep my team as gelled as possible and ways to work with each type of teammate.

As Bjarne Stroustrup summarized, developers need to learn how to present clearly your projects, ideas, and the goals the project achieves. Neumont helped me improve my presentation skills dramatically from when I started school. Each quarter students do at least one presentation in front of their class. Most often it is at the end of a project class to present the project you worked on and attempt to 'sell' the product to the class.

Its easy to spot the difference between new students and those who have learned from a few bad presentations. As I learned more, my presentations sucked less and less and I was able to present a clear, concise idea of my teams project and what it could do.

Writing skills are also critically important as a student at Neumont. Email and IM are two major forms of communication between students, teams, and teachers. My time at Neumont quickly taught me how to keep my emails short and concise to keep the communication understandable. I also learned the importance of IM while going to Neumont. This has become very handy when I joined IBM since IM is now the preferred method of communication for many IBMers.

Learning

Probably the most important skill I learned from Nemont is also an important business skill that is can be very difficult to master. I have become a self-directed learner. I am by no means an expert at self-directed learning but by nature of the compressed course schedule at Neumont, I spent much of my time at Neumont teaching myself more about what we were learning in class.

I consider this the most valuable skill I learned from Neumont. It allows me to adapt to new changes in the workplace and to learn skills to stay ahead of the technology curve. At IBM, many of our teams are beginning to transition from the old-school waterfall method of software development to more agile practices. This transition seems to be a little more difficult for some of the developers who have been with IBM for a long time. Being a self-directed learner lets me cope with any transitions and learn how to work in new environments or programming languages more quickly.

Verdict

Overall I feel that I received a great education from Neumont that allowed me to learn in a style that feels very comfortable to me. Neumont's project-based curriculum is what made me decide to even attend school in the first place. I feel that I graduated with a great working knowledge of the business and soft skills that I need to really become a great software developer.

Neumont is not without faults, of course, there are many many things about the curriculum I feel need to be improved, but that will be the subject of another blog post soon enough. :-)



Image Attributions:

Image by: Sybren Stüvel
Image from: Neumont.edu
Image by: inju
Image by: jisc_infonet

Alt+Drag for Windows

altdrag is a little utility that gives Windows users a feature Linux users have had for a long time  now, the ability to move a window by holding alt and clicking on a window anywhere to move it around. This is one feature I constantly try to do in Windows. Its light on the memory usage and is in a 10k 7z file so check it out.

Chrome SSL Certificate Fun

One warning that has become very annoying to me in Firefox and Chrome is the self-signed certificate warning. Many sites on IBM's intranet use self-signed certificates and I hate having to wade through this screen the first time. Chrome uses the the operating systems certificate store so you simply need to add the certificate to your trusted root certificate authorities to bypass the signed certificate problem in Chrome. I found a way to import the certificate using IE on the Chrome Google Group. 

To import the certificate:

• Go to the site in IE

• Go to the security report (View > Security Report) and click 'View certificates'
  

• In the Certificate Import Wizard press 'Next' and select 'Place all certificates in the following store'
  

• Then choose Trusted Root Certification Authorities
  

After that, you simply finish up the wizard and you're all done! Chrome will now see the certificate in the Trusted Root Certification Authorities and will stop throwing up the Certificate Not Trusted screen on any pages that use that certificate. This is very handy for those of us who use many intranet sites that are self signed.

I imagine there are other, probably better ways so please let me know in the comments if there is an easier way.

*edit* For those of you wondering if that first picture is a screenshot from my computer, I assure you it is not . I have not updated to Vista nor do I plan on updating to Vista.