Wow. It’s been over seven years since I last wrote a post like this one. I have resigned from Wotif (almost three weeks ago now) and am taking up the carefree life of the independent contractor. Should be a blast. In between, I’m enjoying some downtime and recharging.
Continue reading “Moving right along…”
I’ve spent most of the last year involved in an intensive project that really drained me – hence the lack of blogging. I want to blog in a positive fashion this year, so I’ll start by getting a lot of gripes off my chest. 🙂 Call it things that suck.
Here’s a short list, before I define what I mean by “suck”:
and I’m sure that there’s more that will come to me. Today, I’m doing Maven – the rest will come later.
Continue reading “… and sometimes they don’t.”
9 months of intense development later, our first big integration project with Tourico Holidays, went live today, with an additional 1000-odd hotels appearing on our site (with more to come). A good example is Texas where we had only a few hotels outside of the major cities and we now have about 90 (plus more inside the major cities, of course).
Continue reading “Sometimes, things just work…”
Mike Cannon-Brookes asks Is Atlassian still a startup? And when is a startup not a startup anymore? Well, Mike, the answer’s simple. If it still feels like a startup, it’s a startup.
Continue reading “If it quacks like a startup, it is a startup…”
Starting last October, we went through a process of upgrading the main application at Wotif to be running under Java EE 5 (not just Java SE 5). The biggest part of this was upgrading from EJB 2 to EJB 3.
One of the things I noticed was that EJB3 gives you a lot of choices for how to implement and configure EJBs and their associated interfaces. There’s a lot of “standards” on how to do it, many of them conflicting, but very little explanation of why. This is the set of standards I came up with (and was largely successful in getting implemented), and why I chose them.
Continue reading “Interfaces with EJB3”
Well, it took long enough, but it’s finally done:
Response Headers - http://www.wotif.com/ X-Powered-By: Servlet/2.5, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1, JSP/2.1 Set-Cookie: PersistCountryCode=1; Domain=.wotif.com; Expires=Wed, 23-Sep-2037 22:11:45 GMT; Path=/ Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8 Content-Length: 11520 Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:11:45 GMT Server: Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9.0_01 Connection: close 200 OK
Phew. Now maybe I can get those backlogged EJB3-based articles out.
Ahhh… that’s the first production release of my latest project at work out the door today. I can’t talk too much about specifics, but it’s not a big secret that Wotif is enabling various B2B aspects of our web site, mainly with the registered hotels. Today saw the first big step in that direction. 🙂 And it feels great to see a new project go out and get used.
Continue reading “There’s no feeling like releasing software…”
Well, that makes it official: Wotif is the third company I’ve worked in that’s decided to go public. Hope it goes better than the last two… the first misread the market badly and went into a several year downturn, while the other managed to burn through nearly all their VC finance, nearly went bankrupt, and got bought out by one of their venture partners.
Continue reading “Third time’s the charm?”
Well, this entry started as a quick blurb to highlight an article on my boss here at Wotif.com in the Australian Financial Review But that’s not what it’s ended up as. 🙂
Continue reading “Some businesses just don’t get it”
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.
Continue reading “Moving on – reflections”
Software is too expensive to build cheaply.... 