I've been working for Disy for about 2 years. During that time my side projects have grown and grown and taken up ever more of my free time. When SitePoint offered me a part-time position as an editor, I did a 180 - now I have a couple of projects and a side job.
▚Goodbye Disy
Working at Disy was a lot of fun! The technical day to day work never quite got me but we had a lot of very interesting meta-problems to solve.
A monolith with about 1.5 million lines of code split across ~400 Maven modules poses challenges that you won't learn to solve from coding up a to-do-list-app in the freshest fad. Fast(ish) reliable builds, dependency management, shared code ownership, code quality, tool independence - all of these and more are much harder to achieve when you're not just a handful of devs hacking together a web app in twelve months.
(I know, I know, "Why don't you just build microservices?" Has anyone even tried that with a Swing app? No? Hmm, I wonder why...)
More than anything else I learned to be conservative when it comes to libraries, frameworks, tools, patterns, everything really. Even a little cynical maybe - seeing so many of them fall to pieces when used on a large code base made me wonder whether they were even meant to be used for real-world projects. I consider this experience an extremely valuable one to have made.
And then there were the people and, by extension, the company, which were plain awesome! No longer working with them everyday was the hardest part of saying goodbye to Disy.
Guys and gals, I will miss you!
▚Hello SitePoint
SitePoint is building a Java channel and asked me to become its editor. Oh, the pride! And it's right up my alley, too! I've built three blogs (this one, Do-Foss, and Disy's TechBlog) and feel right at home in the Java community, This offer gave me an opportunity to build on this and make it a more integral part of my life.
So since Monday I've been doing my new thing: finding authors, curating content, and generally scheming to make the channel a great success.
"So where is it?" you might ask and my answer would be "Not quite there yet." I will tentatively point you towards the Java tag but with two caveats:
- We're still building valuable content.
- Don't bookmark anything yet, another URL might supersede this one.
If you don't want to miss the big unveiling, follow me.
▚What Else?
So what are the other projects I was talking about?
▚Java Module System in Action
Yes, it's still on... I woefully neglected working on it but with more free time now, I made it my top priority after SitePoint.
▚CodeFX
I will of course continue to write here. I can't wait to bore you with more details about JUnit 5, Java 9/Project Jigsaw, or Clean Comments. Heck, I might even write about something else one day.
That's actually one thing I planned. My list of ideas contains a lot of topics that are not immediately technical but address development as a whole. I've always been interested in the cultural and social aspects of creating software and can't wait to share my thoughts. On Disy's blog I already started to write about how we/they do code reviews - a series, which I will soon cross-post here.
▚Bla, Bla, Bla
Yes, I do talks:
(If you know me, you're now thinking "Of course you are... roll-eyes".)
▚For Hire
Turns out that knowledge about Java 9 and JUnit 5 interests other people as well (who would've thought?). If you or your company are of such a curious persuasion and would like to get some help on planning migrations or training you and your fellow developers, you can hire me for that - just drop me a mail.
▚Err, coding?
Ah, yes. Looks like I'm no longer a coder who writes - technically I'm now a writer/editor who ... codes? Do I? Well, it's a passion, so I'm sure it'll push its way through. In fact, just yesterday I started to work on a new side project, which uses - take a deep breath - JavaScript. Shocker!
But I have to make sure that I have time left to code. Otherwise I'll just end up an author writing about things he has no clue about. And I hate those!