the corner office

... that on the walk to the station, my damp hair froze solid.

Winter rocks.

I like to write up a bit of geek tech review each year, this is the 2008 instalment.

Professionally, what can I say? It's been a good year. Wrote lots and lots of Java and read lots of C++. I think I'm quite firmly a back-end developer now, I've barely touched html or jsps this year, and I don't mind saying that I don't miss it much. Lots of hairy multi-threading, interesting libraries and utilities, some grid computing experimentation, lots of web services.

The most interesting and significant thing for me this year has been an exposure to distributed / service-oriented systems development. Not in the marketechturish all-your-base-are-belong-to-our-ESB kind of way, but in a 'deploy n instances of your app into a completely chaotic and heterogenous cluster of nodes and start seeing how things can go wrong' kind of way. I've been privileged to have many of my (and my colleagues') preconceptions about design and architecture challenged and turned upside down by some very clever distributed systems architects, and I've emerged with new perspectives on performance and scalability because of it.

On the personal geekery front, it's been a mixed bag. My quasi-goal for 2008 had been to get back to C++ and to polish off some low-level Unixy type stuff I've been tinkering on for ages, before moving onto something more exotic and new (to me), like Ruby or Python.

Then in Feb, after finishing my last Honours exams, I reactivated my Eve Online account. I decided to park my plans, write a GUI app to help my in-game trading instead, and share that. Didn't get very far - firstly because I spent too much time playing and too little time coding, and because I just couldn't get going with a GUI framework. I decided to write the app in Java to get it done quickly (ha ha), played with Swing and SWT/JFace/RCP, and didn't get very far with either.

By halfway through the year I'd reached a decent profit target from trading, still had no decent or sharable trading app, and was starting to get a bit bored. I cancelled my Eve subscription and decided I'd had enough of Java GUIs. I opened up the Unix books again and started getting some traction with that.

Then in August, an opportunity to do an interesting work-related pet project came up, and I spent the better part of the next 3 months devoting every free moment to that. It involved things like Apache Mina and asynchronous I/O, and a lot of C++ interaction. Because it was work-related, couldn't talk about it, and no interesting code to share. But it was a really worthwhile chunk of work, and I learned a lot from it.

In November I finally geared down and started casting about for something new to do. I picked up yet another fun pet project which is yet again a little too close to work to blog about. Decided not do it in Java, and chose C++ instead: web services and a bit of multithreading, so it's really interesting tackling familiar problems using a different language.

So, despite some diversions and the first half of the year not being productive at all, I'm happily tinkering away again.

My goals for 2009? Not entirely sure exactly what I'm going to do, but:

• I'm not going to spend my hobby time writing Java code. Java is my day job language: it's a great language, but I want (and need) to broaden my horizons.
• I live in Ubuntu again, I almost never boot into Windows at home. I intend to keep it that way.
• I want to achieve a level of C++ proficiency I'm happy with, before moving on to something else.
• I want to finish the Unix systems programming stuff I've been tinkering on for the past 3 years. Again, this is a 'foundation' thing I want under my belt, even if I never write a single select professionally.
• If I get through that by the end of 2009, I'll pick a new language to start on. It'll probably be Ruby.

That's it. Let's see how 2009 turns out.

Mary Poppins was on ITV this afternoon. I chuckled when I heard Mr Banks say this:

A British bank is run with precision
A British home requires nothing less
Tradition, discipline and rules
Must be the tools
Without them disorder, chaos, moral disintegration
In short you have a ghastly mess

Oh man, I've had a brilliant Christmas day. Great food and great company and some fine beer and whiskey. All that's left is to say I hope you've had a splendid day too, and then I can go to bed.

Overheard from an American lass talking on her mobile along Charing Cross Road:

It happens in New York too, Mommy.

We spent last week in Dartmoor. Beautiful place. Bleak, grim, but that's a large part of the appeal. Did some walking and got to see some interesting things - tors, ancient woods, stone circles and burial mounds, winding country lanes, cathedrals and abbeys etc etc. I think the only thing that could have made it even cooler is if we'd been snowed in and didn't have to come back!

I do not think that Germany should be too heartbroken about not getting the nod to join the Brown/Darling muppet show:

The fact that Angela Merkel, leader of Europe's largest economy, was not invited to yesterday's European summit in Downing Street speaks volumes about the federal republic's hostility to the current vogue for Keynesian solutions, and the friction within the EU.

Last Friday Mrs Merkel said Germany would not "join in a multibillion race simply to create the impression we have done something".

Germany's prudence is not a bad thing, regardless of the politics behind whatever positions they're taking. Just because big business is excited about stimulus plans doesn't make these plans a good thing, it just means big business is very excited at the prospect of boosted profits at the taxpayers' expense.

The story of the sham Lapland theme park in the New Forest has been a hoot since it broke earlier this week, and now with a perfect ending (per the Times):

Today families were arriving to find the entrance coned off. A woman from the park shouted through the fence: "Santa's gone home, Santa's f*****g dead."

Not entirely coincidentally, since it is December, but somewhat apropos nonetheless, we took Leo to a Christmas thingy at a garden centre up the road from us on Monday. At least they had live reindeer (Leo not interested), animatronic animals and a pretty display (Leo very interested), a 'magic ride' aka wobbling train carriage in a darkroom with lots of UV paint and two scrolling painted murals on either side (Leo thoroughly unsure what to make of the experience, much like his parents) and getting to sit on Satan Claus' lap (Leo not liking one bit).

It was cheap and cheerful and the queue wasn't too long (just as well because some kid ahead of us had pooped and the smell was what can only be described as insistent), and we got a nice photo with Leo not looking *too* traumatised. And Leo got a teddy bear as a gift which we named Jabulani on account of the cheerfulness our son was (not) exhibiting by the end of the day, which has now turned into his new best friend.

The joys of Christmas!

There's an interesting discussion at TSS about the Servlet 3.0 spec. Two noteworthy things coming from the new spec are continuations, and annotations.

Continuations are great... they're already implemented in Jetty and Tomcat - subjectively, Jetty's approach looks better - and are a brilliant way to break away from thread-per-request processing, allowing better scalability and interesting new ways of doing things.

Annotations... eeeeh, not so much. Annotations are great when used judiciously but they must have turned into one of the most abused features in Java. Sure it might be convenient to specify your paths and mappings in a POJO and start specifying arbitrary methods as GET and POST handlers, but by the time you do that, you no longer have a POJO... you just have lots of hard-coded configuration in the guts of your code. Thumbs down from me.