Sprint 1 Extended

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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.

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