Shambling Towards Perfection

I started this book waaaay back in the good ol' days, BC. Before Coronavirus. And then the pandemic struck and blew up my placid dev existence. On Friday, March 13, 2020 at 4pm NMSU finally decided to allow us those of us who wanted or needed to, to work from home. I took the weekend plus 2 days to get my home office set up; I had a feeling this was going to go on longer than any of us thought at the time. That decision has paid off in spades as I was able to get a pretty sweet dedicated workspace set up, with a corner desk, my 2 personal monitors, my work monitor, my work tower, a printer/storage cabinet, and a new laser printer. Oh, and a nice office chair and one of those carpet protectors. Current me is very grateful to past me for having that forethought...  Anyway, I officially started working from home March 18. By that time NMSU was no longer "allowing" us to work from home by choice, but instead sending everyone possible home. In less than a week we had to move n...

The meeting Monday with my advisor was short and quick. He liked the looks of the formatting (courtesy my husband, the technical writer) and said he didn’t want to take a longer look and to just send it out when I thought it was ready. I hadn’t been able to get screenshots/usage scenarios in before the meeting, so I didn’t send the paper out until last night when I got that put in. For our next and final meeting, we agreed that I’d have at least an outline of the topics for the slideshow presentation I’ll be giving as part of my final exam. The presentation plus demo of the software need to take approximately 30 minutes, uninterrupted. I’ll also work on bugs and UI improvements and start cramming reviewing for the oral exam component. That will be... interesting... as one of the topics that usually gets covered during the oral exam is from the very first class I took, in fall 2008. O_O Wish me luck, ‘cause I’m gonna need it!

One of the issues for this sprint was improving my code's correctness. I installed and used the Eclipse plugins FindBugs , PMD , and CheckStyle . While these did point out some very valid issues, including not properly closing database resources, doing really bad things in an override of equals, etc., they also pointed out some things that completely flummoxed me. The biggest example is that apparently in Java one can declare virtually anything as final, including method parameters. I had known that methods and classes could be declared final though I had never used such functionality (nor had it explained or recommended either during my Bachelors degree or during my Masters degree, despite MANY Java-centric classes), but parameters was a new one. Some claim parameters should be declared final, while others say it clutters code for very little benefit. Additionally if you do, in fact, reassign a value to a parameter, the very same tools will mark it as an error. So there's qu...

So apparently slf4j is a logging abstraction framework meant to let you use the actual logging implementation of your choice. So slf4j lets you use Jakarta Commons Logging (and this is what DBUnit does), which is ALSO a logging abstraction framework meant to let you use the actual logging implementation of your choice. So I STILL need yet another library in order to get logging to files instead of to System.err. I just... For crying out loud. Fine then. I just downloaded log4j . Are you finally satisfied, logging libraries??? Argh. :(