from my work as a developer
Archive for August, 2009
the first day
Aug 19th
Today was my first day at work after short vacation – only ten days 
Basically I spent that day reading mails and trying fit my self again with work. I’ve also read some blog entries to be at least up-to-date with latest news.
After all I was ready to solve some bugs. I picked one and started with test to confirm that there had been really a bug. With test on my side I was able to dig into the code. It took few minutes to implements the changes to solve the bug. Test confirmed that. So then I committed the changes and the test to a source code repository.
I started working on the next bug and after some explanation from a team-mate I redirected the bug to him 
He discovered what was wrong, so he will be able to solve it the best!
tests on roids
Aug 5th
Finally I was able to speed-up tests in our project. I had to made some dirty trick with XmlBeans. XmlBeans are not so efficient as other Xml marshalling libraries, but our whole technology stack is using them, so there’s no option 
Anyway, I solved that but “borrowing” SchemaTypeSystem implementation from other project. The whole trick is to remove eager static initialization! That’s the problem, XmlBeans doing lot of static initialization when some class from hierarchy is going to be loaded. Maybe it’s a good idea in server environment, but it’s killing unit tests.
Right now the whole test task run takes around 9 minutes and previously it was 30 minutes! So I can say it was a very efficient day!
And at the end – I discovered two nice demos about how IntelliJ IDEA (my lovely ide) supports Java, Groovy and Scala development, they are fantastic! You have to take a look:
lazy time
Aug 4th
The vacations period is the most lazy time ever. No testers, no managers, no developers – almost. So what can you do to survive? In my case I’ve read a book – Agile Software Development with Scrum and had also prepared my self to pass Sun Certified Java Programmer, Standard Edition 6 exam which I passed! So at least I can say I know how to write programs in Java language
That exam was the most frustrating ever, I had been learning my self from a book and from the mocks. The mocks are good when you don’t know Java in deep, but in other case they just boggle your mind 
Any way I passed and I can start preparing my self for a next exam – I think it will be Sun Certified Web Component Developer for the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5.
