from my work as a developer
Lukasz
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Homepage: http://www.lenart.org.pl
Posts by Lukasz
ordinary day
Jul 13th
Today was very ordinary day, I’ve solved some bugs, sent some requests for explanation and so on. Nothing special 
I also started assigning some Issues regarding Clean Code Day. So boring 
Few days ago I ordered some books about Agile and Scrum from Amazon. I’m really looking forward to put my hands on them. It would be very nice to introduce Scrum methodology in my current company. I need some basis and I will try.
the d-day is comming
Jul 9th
I spent the whole day preparing Issues for the Clean Code Day. What the Clean Code Day is? It’s a day when we put the effort to improve code quality by removing unnecessary comments, some Checkstyle warnings and so on. It isn’t optimal way to solve such problems, but in our situation, the only one! We have about 3.000 warnings from the Checkstyle – quite a bit! So we’re trying to improve the Code Quality each day – when you’re working with some class, clean it up, improve a design, split huge methods – be aware!
Tomorrow I will host a meeting for the reset of the team, to explain what we want to achieve and why. How to solve assigned issues and do even more. It’s a vacation period, so it shouldn’t be a problem – almost nobody is testing the application. And the most important thing is that, we have a bless from Project Manager!
the first retrospective meeting
Jul 8th
You probably heard about Scrum? Wonderful Agile project management methodology. Today I had opportunity to participate in my first retrospective meeting. It was about finished Javarsovia conference, I had mentioned about it in the previous post. The Sprint took 6 months, a bit too much for the Iteration
Any way we had posits to described our feelings, what was wrong, what was good. We summarized what we did and where is the space for improvement. It took more then 3 hours, but I think it was worth. I hope, I will have possibility to be a part of some Agile team in the future. We also agreed that we should have dedicated application to handle such events – good project for community!
That was after my work day. And I had made the biggest mistake ever. I was very upset and I forcefully switched off computer of one of my team members. It was very stupid, I behaved like Jerk! I have no explanation for that, I can just say “Sorry”!
after big bang
Jul 7th
As you probably noticed, I wrote nothing for four/five days. The explanation is simple – we – Warsaw JUG – organized the largest free-of-charge conference about Java in Poland – Javarsovia 2009! It was one-day conference, but we had three parallel tracks with tech-talks and one additional track for workshop. 16 speakers talked about Java and JVM related technologies. We also had afterparty to had opportunity to talk about non-technical topics. That’s how you get new friends 
Yesterday I had very short workday, I just dispatched some bugs to other team members – right now I’m the “very important person” in the project
Today, I’ve introduced new team members in the project code base. I’m planning also some pare-programing to introduce them deeply into the code. It’s a waste of time, you can say , but that’s the best option to learn “rookies” how the project is going.
And I still the first with largest solved bug number!
borring day
Jul 2nd
Yeah, it was very boring day, I finished solving the bug from previous day, added additional test and closed the issue, nothing special. I was also checking logs to find something interesting, I mean, some unusual bug. Nothing, just some common problems with timeouts and performance
So, I ran coverage report and started preparing some issues that have to be solved quickly, especially additional tests and code clean-up. As we have new team members, I think it will be the best way to introduce them in to the project by assign some minor issues and tasks as write those additional tests to them. The best way to learned unknown project is prepare the tests for it.
I got free hand for that, so I’m planning to do this next week, when nobody is being pushing us to solve some important bugs.
hunting
Jul 1st
Today I got a new task – analyse thread dumps from test environment and try to find what was wrong
Yeah, easy job, but it was totally something new for me so I started looking around (with Google) how to do that. As we’re using the best Java Application Server and the best Java Virtual Machine, it was easy. I found a guideline how to prepare thread dump, what it contains, how to read messages and so on. And at the end there was statement which was so funny – jvm will inform you directly about deadlocks, thread chaining and so on, you don’t have to analyse each entry in the dump file
With new knowledge on my side, I discovered very fast that everything was ok, no deadlocks, no thread chaining, nothing interesting. The only thing was suspected – too many calls to cache library to spool object from memory to a hard disk. I must look on that deeply.
With no success, I started reading server logs, but it was so ineffective, so I opened cygwin console and wrote some small script to speed up the work. After few minutes I had all logs merged together and was able to search them with grep tool, few seconds later I found the first bug. All I have to do is to prepare a fix tomorrow!
super fast
Jun 30th
Today’s day was super fast, I spent whole day solving bugs and I closed most of them, nothing special, mostly some typos and misunderstands. And at least, I improved my statistics, I closed something about 5 bugs in one day. Till today I had been solving one bug per week! Impressive?
the day after
Jun 29th
At last I had time to wrote few words about conference on which I had been attended during weekend – COOLuary v2 in Gdansk. It wasn’t ordinary conference, it was UnConference. There isn’t agenda on such conferences, it’s created by the attendees on the beginning. There aren’t presentations, just talks on proposed subjects. There is lot of discussions and knowledge transfers around – brain donor. I also met very clever guys from Spartz.com which are cooperating with Atlassian, it was very interesting and knowledgeable!
On the second day was a workshop and I leaded one session about TDD – Randori Session. After all I was totally exhausted, but it was worth to spent two days in Gdansk and 5 hours in a train
Any way, today I had to go back to work and few bugs were waiting for me. I did one simple bug and also some minor refactoring with that class – following boy scout rule – leave the campground cleaner that you found it. To close few more bugs, I spent the rest of the day confirming if them really were bugs – so boring.
a day without hangover
Jun 26th
The wine testing experience was quit nice, I learned a lot about a wine and how to drink it, how to feel all the best. You don’t have to love it, but there is magic which can be introduce to your life, all is needed is to give it a chance.
Yeah, but today I had to forgot about that and stick with a real world! I went back to refactoring I had started day before. When I dug deeply I discovered that I had to made another change. I did it, but that was the last. I just wanted commit the changes to repository so I started playing with tests. I had to solve some small mistakes (NullPointerException and ClassCastException ) and I was able to finish the work. I committed them all to the repository and went home – you know this pattern? Commit and Exit
The incoming weekend I will spend on UnConference in Gdansk, I’m looking forward for a great time!
the evolution
Jun 26th
Today I took a look on the internal framework. It isn’t a real framework, but rather a bunch of reusable classes. I’ve been looking around and discovered some classes made by an Architect from the Task Force. It was almost the same crappy code as we made, but was alder. So, it brought home to me, that he wasn’t a a perfect developer from beginning, he evolved and still evolves. He accepted his mistakes and was able to took over them, so I should do the same!
After lunch I started some simple refactoring to help my fellow to solve a bug. He changed some parts on his side and I did the same on my. And then I discovered that I’m not able to commit my changes to the repository. They will break the tests without changes introduced by him. The same was with him, he wasn’t able commit changes without my changes. The classic deadlock! He sent me his changes by e-mail and I implemented them on my local copy, but then the day was over. I went for a nice company event, we have been tasting the wines, so nice!
