Moving on – reflections

I’m leaving Suncorp in January, after about 3 years there. I’m taking up a position at wotif.com where I will be joining a small team that drives their website.
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Well, I’m back up… shame the server wasn’t.

About two weeks ago, the server company I go through (iwebserv.com.au) had an “incident”… one of the hard disks on the main server died. This caused an extended outage (almost a week), and a total loss of data. For one reason or another, iwebserv have not been able to resurrect the data on the server yet.
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Hibernate named queries rock

I’m now working on my second project with Hibernate, having delivered the first, and I’m playing with some of the features I didn’t have time to figure out last time. And I have to say: named queries rock, big time.

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Interesting article on Smalltalk

I was reading Alan Kay’s Early History of Smalltalk recently. Quite an interesting article.
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Software is too expensive too build cheaply.

That’s the title for my blog, and it’s a philosophy I believe in 100%. Software, like many other areas of life, is not a place to cut corners (at least, certain corners). There are certain expenses you have to be willing to pay if you want a quality product that will stand the test of time; avoiding them simply pushes immediate cost now to bigger nastier costs later.
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Well, at least I’ve answered one question

I figured out why the web app I was trying to build before broken when I used the exported build script. Turns out that you need to run a setup script to get your environment “just right” before running the build.
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I’m not sure exactly why WebLogic Workshop bothers to make things customisable

It just makes things break!!

(Followup at end)
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Why do things have to be so bloody hard????

I did a silly thing last week. I’ve been avoiding being given a task for the last nine months, and then all of a sudden I ended up volunteering to do it, for all sorts of reasons. The task: work out how to use WebLogic Workshop as a real tool, in conjunction with our other standard practices (like, oh, source control unit tests command-line builds and daily/continuous builds And I’m realizing why I tried so hard to avoid it.
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Interesting comment on “talent”

The New Yorker has an article on talent management in modern corporations It looks into how companies manage talent to improve performance. Quite a good read.

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Annoying issue with Javascript and arrays

Stumbled across this one recently. Stumbled as in I fell down, grazed my knees, and couldn’t get up properly for a couple of hours. Turns out that arrays in Javascript can have a length that is totally utterly wrong. 😦

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