Recent blog entries for jtangney

After several weeks of heavy pounding, I have finished up a project. Yes, it's a web-based app in Java. Struts, Hibernate, Ant, XDoclet - the usual suspects. It's featured on my web site's home page.

I am working angles to try to find my way in the stormy seas of kids, education and software. Software for kids is mostly either insipid or irrelevant, and in either case is highly unlikely to be a source of sufficient revenue.

I have just finished reading Robert Read's How to be a Programmer essay. Not startling, but it was nice to reflect on what I have learned over the decades and compare that to what they're teaching young programmers today.

I also started on Fowler's definitive Refactoring. It's great! Although the techniques should be quite familiar, it's worth seeing them all laid out together in a handy reference work.

And it's time to re-read the course notes from a Patterns class I attended, taught by Allen Holub. He's great.

So, beyond my current spirit of self-improvement, I have been starting on some of the open source projects I have been threatening for a while. They include a decision-support system for parent's choosing an elementary school in the East Bay (talk about niche.) The technology is simple and extensible, and I have access to a corpus of data (provided by Neighborhood Parents' Network) in that particular problem space. It's web based and being realised in Java.

Next is a bookmark system - yet another - for maintaining my currently unamanageable collection at Critical Mass Design. The idea was inspired by collaborative tagging, though I am unlikely to make this collaborative.

I am in a little rush of new technologies and tools at the moment. I just discovered XDoclet and Hibernate ORM service (not framework!) while building a persistence mechanism the hard, old-fashioned way (with explicit JDBC calls.) I have been reading about CRM114 (although I am very happy with SpamSieve on my Mac.

Oh yeah. I'm also trying to run my business.