Sprint 1 Extended

-
I met with my adviser for the first time last Wednesday, and we decided our next meeting would be September 24 and then we'll meet every two weeks thereafter. Since the 24th would fall in the middle of a sprint I decided to extend the first one to end this Saturday, the 29th (I was also under the weather several days last week, so it was a good move all around). On the 30th I'll upload all my code to the version control system my prof has set up (svn) and configure everything so that it will run on the department servers. I'll be demoing my latest work at every meeting, so every other Sunday will be configuration day. I realize continuous builds on the department machines would be better but it's not exactly practical, so I'm settling for continuous builds on my home machine.

Since my last post I have successfully configured Tomcat to use SSL and jbcrypt. The latter involved writing a custom realm but turned out to be quite trivial; I simply extended JDBCRealm and overrode the authenticate method. That was all that was required.

I've now moved on to researching logging. My application now doesn't have any sort of logging so debugging can be problematic, to say the least. I already have dependencies on slf4j and Jakarta Commons Logging due to DBUnit so I figured I might as well use what I have. I'm researching how to use slf4j with tomcat and how to configure everything properly. It's a lot of information to go through, so it's a good thing I allocated plenty of time for this task...

During lunch breaks and while waiting at the doctor's office I have also been reading The Pragmatic Programmer in an effort to become a better developer. I'm hoping to get through this and several other books in the course of my project all with the aim of becoming a super ultimate software developer zombie ninja. My only critique of the book so far is that some of the advice is dated; it references technologies that dead-ended or are now obsolete and of course misses out on new movements and techniques within software development. It would be great if an updated version of the book were published. I can dream, anyway.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Git. The WHAT and WHY Edition.

-
Image
Lately I've seen a lot of new/aspiring developers talk about difficulties learning git . I was confused at first, because there are approximately a zillion git tutorials out there. But then I started really looking at what people were saying AND what all those tutorials contain. The problem is most tutorials start out with "here are a ton of git commands to memorize", and this is not where people are having problems. People are having problems with "what is git, why should I learn it, and what does it look like to use it in a real-life project?", and those questions are largely not answered in all those millions of tutorials. So at the risk of redundancy, I'm going to attempt to address these questions in Yet Another Article About Git. First, I want to make it clear that if you want to be a programmer, any kind of programmer, you need to know git. You just DO. This is the short version of the answer to "why should I learn it?".  The medium length a
Read more

"Does it get easier?" Yes, but Also No...

-
Image
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay It's complicated... "Does it get easier?" I see some form of this question asked a lot in beginner programming groups. I always struggle with how to answer this honestly and clearly, because the truth is not that simple. In some ways it does get easier, but in other ways it is almost always going to be difficult if you are advancing in your career . If you are a programmer and your job is easy for years on end, the most likely explanation is that you're in the kind of dead-end position that people try to avoid, not the kind of position people dream about when they think of becoming a developer. Most likely you are not getting better at being a dev, not working with new tech or solving new kinds of problems, not being given more responsibility, etc. etc. etc. I've seen some pushback from other newbie programmers on the idea that it could remain difficult past the initial learning stage. Notably I have never once seen somebody who
Read more

How to Land Your First Dev Job: Develop Yourself, Market Yourself

-
Image
Image by magnetme from Pixabay In the coding and tech groups I'm in, I see the same question asked over and over by folks who are just learning to code, finishing up a bootcamp, degree, or other training program, or who have been looking for that first job for awhile and not having any luck: "what do I need to do to get my first dev job?" There's a whole ton of info out there on this topic, but it's scattered all over, so I thought I would gather together the best resources I've come across and share them, along with a bit of context, to try and help everybody struggling with or just plain wondering about this. There are a lot  of things you can do to improve your chances of finding a job and hopefully shorten your job search. They are broadly divided into 2 categories: developing yourself and your skills, and marketing yourself and your skills. Note that you don't need to do everything on this list, nor do you need to do it all at once. This is an "
Read more