Still breathing

I changed jobs about 13 months ago and there hasn't been much time for blogging since then but I think I'm going to start making the effort again.

The new technologies I'm learning fall into 2 categories.  On the one hand, there's Big Data stuff like Hadoop, Scala and Spark.  On the other, there's client-side web development with AngularJS.  So these things are my learning priorities for the moment.

Almost all the Java programming we do is with Spring 4.3.  I was trying really hard to get into an environment where I'd be working in Spring all the time, so that worked out good.  My employer is running a couple of years behind the latest and greatest from Pivotal so I've done some training sessions there about Spring Boot and Spring Data and I think we're getting close to the critical mass where everyone sees the value of these innovations and the team as a whole is ready to adopt them.

JHipster is a technology I've got my eye on right now, seems like it might be a good match for what we are doing at work once we've adopted Spring Boot.

Automated testing has been a focus of my career for the last 8-9 years and we're currently making a priority of improving code quality, so there has been fertile ground for these ideas.  I've been working a lot with one of the other developers who is also passionate about testing.  We have done a few presentations and I'm also exploring some techniques I hadn't found the opportunity to use such as Spring Embedded databases.

We use Wildfly, so I got to renew my love affair with JBoss, sort of.  This decision was made to take advantage of Wildfly's support for JMS, but IMO the company would be better off separating the servlet/JSP container and the messaging server.

I'm trying to get up to speed on client-side automated testing tools like Karma, Jasmine and Protractor.  I'd have to describe my progress today as 'not over the hump yet'.  I've written a few tests in both Karma and Protractor but they don't come rolling off my fingertips.  It's still a big effort.

The Angular version we use at work is AngularJS (i.e. Angular 1).  Last time I looked, Angular was on version 6, so that's a bit frustrating.  I really need to focus on mastering what we use at work first, but there's a slight sense of wasted effort coming up to speed on a legacy framework.

The IDE we use is IntelliJ IDEA.  It's been fun using this and I have to say I now feel like this is the best Java IDE I've used, but I feel a bit guilty using a non-free tool.  I've played around a bit with Visual Studio Code and could see investing more time in that.  It seems pretty fast and powerful and will also support Spring Tool Suite 4.

The cool stack for Big Data these days seems to be Scala on Spark on Hadoop.  I was briefly interested in Hadoop after an NFJS presentation a while back but haven't really kept up with it.  Our direction before this was Cassandra and I learned a bit about Cassandra before this.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through a Coursera class called Functional Programming in Scala.  I would say the Scala language itself isn't especially hard but doing absolutely everything with functional programming will tie your brain up in knots like a pretzel.  I thought I was good at this from years of being a Lisp guy but what I quickly realized is what I used to do is use recursion where recursion seemed comfortable and procedural techniques where they seemed comfortable.  Pure functional is harder.

Comparing what I'm doing now with my Learning Priorities of 2015, Cloud Foundry and Gradle have fallen by the wayside.  We use Maven at my current employer and I don't think any of the places I considered before that were looking for Gradle.

'More Spring' was a good bet.  I've always been a bit skeptical about certifications, but in restrospect I feel the Spring Certification was a good move that got me back up to speed on the Spring basics and a few new developments at a time when I was getting rusty.

We were starting to use Docker a little at my previous job and it plays a small role where I'm working.  I would say this is good stuff to know but hasn't yet been critical for me.

Jenkins and CI were important at my previous job.  Now I'm a user of the Jenkins CI server but I'm not responsible for it as before.

TextMate, meh.  It was OK.  I used it for a few months but eventually went back to The One True Editor.

Currently reading: Soft Skills.  Keep up on what I'm reading at Goodreads.

I'm generally feeling like my career is back on track and it's a great time to be an active developer.