the corner office

Tco-blog started out as a way for me to teach myself J2EE development a few years ago. I tinkered on it, off and on, for over a year, and it eventually replaced "The Corner Office" version 1, my ageing Lotus Domino based weblog, early in 2006. I'd had to run Lotus Notes using Wine on my Linux desktop at home to update my blog, which had been getting really tiring; "The Corner Office" version 2 was sorely needed. By then J2EE development was my day job though, and I wanted to do other fun things when I got home at night. By the time I went live with tco-blog, as I'd come to call the java app, I'd gotten rather tired of working on it, and left it mostly untouched for the better part of 2006.

The first version was quite primitive: many elements of The Corner Office were hard-coded into the design. Being my first attempt at writing a Java web app, the code was mostly crap (moreso than now!). Additionally, many admin functions required direct manipulation of the MySQL tables.

I was using an instance of the blog at home for a personal technical journal, and it bugged me that I couldn't customise it, not even change the title. I had a public and a personal The Corner Office, and that was untidy. Also, my wife kept asking me if I'd help her to set up a blog. That required making quite a few changes, so towards the end of 2006, while spending a few weeks in Durban, waiting to move to the UK, I revisited the app, and started generalising the design so that it was properly re-usable. I also added more of the remaining pieces of functionality needed for a respectable admin app. We then moved to the UK, and for two more months, I did next to nothing with it.

Early this year I decided, as part of a quasi New Year's resolution, to be more focused with my pet software projects. Part of that involved setting myself tangible goals, and I decided that before carrying on with anything else, I was going to finish off tco-blog, once and for all. What did 'finishing off' mean? Well, what better tangible goal than downloadable code? In addition to giving me something to work towards, I liked the idea, because sitting on a hard drive at home, the code was inert. On a website, shared, it at least has the potential to be useful, no matter how slight. So alongside writing exams and starting a new job and getting settled in a new country, I plodded on with the app and slowly but surely, it all came together. There ended up being a great deal more refactoring and feature-adding than I'd anticipated, but it's done. First tangible goal of 2007 achieved, cool for me!