Java Thinking

I went to a Agile Sydney meetup recently - "Automated web tests as a team communication tool" - by John Smart of Wakaleo Consulting . It was great stuff, and the presentation is now online . There is a nice story here in that the project feature set is documented via easily readable and executable tests, and the reporting shows which features are implemented and which aren't. More information on the the Thucydides tool he references can be found at: https://github.com/thucydides-webtests/thucydides/wiki While reading that presentation online, I found more gold here in some of his other presentations: JUnit Kung Fu: Getting More Out of Your Unit Tests Introduction to Domain Driven Design They are a great read and are great pointers in the right direction to improve your software development. (If you haven't seen them before, check out Wakaleo's training courses . I haven't been on them, but based on the course content, they look to be the most relevant ...

I just discovered http://www.ohloh.net/ - this is a great site, I think the easiest way I can describe it is by saying it is like linkedin.com , but based on opensource projects. You can create an account, and then add opensource projects to your 'stack'. You can: see geographically where people with a particular project on their stack are located add your experience to your profile to build your resume view statistics for different languages and projects. This is a very interesting site, and it will be interesting to see where it goes. Check out my profile .

I'm sitting here looking at a JSP file which is over 5000 lines long. It has a massive amount of Java code and JavaScript scattered through it, along with some custom tag libraries. It generates an HTML file over 1.5 meg in download size. The workstation I am using is a Pentium D with 1 Gig of RAM, and the tools I'm using can't cope so I'm resorting to simple text editors to make changes. Once again, I'm spending most of my time at work learning (once again) what not to do. I'm one of the (apparently) few people who know not to do this kind of thing. But this is where I spend most of my time - fixing other peoples mistakes - and unfortunately this is a direct impediment to me learning new, better things and improving myself. I'm really looking forward to the day a manager says: "Instead of getting 3 developers who don't know what they are doing to build the system, and then bring someone good in to fix it, why don't we get one good developer to ...