Wednesday, 28 November 2007
Back in the saddle
I am pleased to report that, after a long hiatus I am finally back in front of an IDE an writing actual software code again, and it is a very welcome return. Indeed I had a long break over coding since I switched jobs—first having a three-month period in which to shore up my previous project and train my successor (an important enough task, but as this blog has shown, one which still left me with plenty of time left over for pursuits such as Chinese). Then being put on a new project with my new employer, the first month was spent drawing up technical specifications. Which is all well and good, but for whatever reason drawing up UML diagrams and Word documents is far less satisfying than producing functioning code.
My new project has a few milestones in it to make things a little more interesting too. Besides having a junior developer under me, I also have root access on our test server—by far the most powerful box I have ever had superuser access to: it's a quad 3GHz Intel Xeon box with 8GB of RAM (nice!), running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The middleware/database/operating system breakdown of my last three projects shows what a wide overview I'm getting of the industry:
| Middleware | Database | Operating System |
|---|---|---|
| Oracle AS | Oracle | Red Hat Linux |
| BEA Weblogic | Ingres | Sun Solaris |
| IBM WebSphere | DB2 | AS/400 |
(My own sites on craven.fr are JBoss/DB2/Linux, for those keeping track at home.) We'll also be using SOAP Web Services to communicate with .NET on this project, so that's another interesting aspect as well.
