I have decided to reboot my blog using Blogger templates. This means the layout is not as well designed as I might like - the previous design had six years of editing and tweaking...! Since the most boring type of blog post is one that talks about the blog itself, I'll leave things at that.
I have recently started working at a new company, a cloud technology start-up based at Edinburgh University. Cloudsoft produce Monterey, a middleware framework for application mobility across various cloud infrastructure providers. I am developing the latest version of this, on which more later. It is a great environment to work in, with really smart colleagues and lots of challenges that keep me thinking. There are also the obvious benefits of being based in the University, such as very fast Internet and free access to academic journals.
Due to the scope of my work, I have found myself learning a lot of interesting new things. These range from picking up new languages (Groovy), libraries and APIs (jclouds, AWS, Seam CDI), applications (Redis, Karaf, Chef, Infinispan) as well as technologies (OSGi, PaaS). I am also working on open source projects during 20% of my time, which will mostly involve Qpid but I have also been investigating jclouds and elasticsearch. I hope to be able to write more about many of these topics.
Showing posts with label development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label development. Show all posts
23/09/2011
18/04/2009
Working Standards
well, i've now been working at yell adworks for almost three months, and i'm really enjoying it so far. after spending (probably too much) time on design, we have got started on development of a workflow engine system. i'm using spring, hibernate, mule, cxf, jbpm and other interesting technologies, some of which i'm still learning about (mule and associated esb technologies) or, in the case of spring, updating myself on - until now the most recent version of spring i had used was 2.0.9 and we are using 2.5.6, with attendant annotation based goodness and so on.
one of the only problems so far is the continuous integration system, which is set up with a very strict set of checkstyle and PMD rules for code quality. i'm all in favour of managing code quality as an automated process and continuous integration with these tools is a Good Thing, but i keep falling foul of some of the rules, in particular the checks for multiple return statements in one method, to enforce single exit points. i believe writing methods with guard clauses up front is the most readable and elegant way of expressing certain types of logic, and apparently martin fowler agrees (see his refactoring book) with me. the following discussion on stackoverflow is relevant, too. also, there are strict rules on long variable names, which keep me from naming things like constraintDefinition or workflowInstance although i do agree with the restriction on short (less than four characters) names.
i'm (really) going to try and make more of an effort to keep this blog updated more frequently, since it's over a year since i last posted ;)
one of the only problems so far is the continuous integration system, which is set up with a very strict set of checkstyle and PMD rules for code quality. i'm all in favour of managing code quality as an automated process and continuous integration with these tools is a Good Thing, but i keep falling foul of some of the rules, in particular the checks for multiple return statements in one method, to enforce single exit points. i believe writing methods with guard clauses up front is the most readable and elegant way of expressing certain types of logic, and apparently martin fowler agrees (see his refactoring book) with me. the following discussion on stackoverflow is relevant, too. also, there are strict rules on long variable names, which keep me from naming things like constraintDefinition or workflowInstance although i do agree with the restriction on short (less than four characters) names.
i'm (really) going to try and make more of an effort to keep this blog updated more frequently, since it's over a year since i last posted ;)
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