The Art of Being Dorian

This week, I’ve started working on my delayed projects again.  I feel exhausted from the week.  But I also can not wait to play around with my projects.

Learning Qt

I’ve always admired the KDE and Qt developers.  They make some of the most innovative and interesting technology in the consumer-desktop-mobile land.  I’ve decided to pick up learning Qt and C++.  So far I’ve read the beginning of C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (1st ed).  I need to play around with C++, which I plan on doing it while using Qt Creator.  One of my first major Qt experiments might be getting the TEA text editor working on my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.  I know that Nokia just released the tech preview  of Qt 4 for S60 devices.  But I’ll give it a shot.  Hopefully the GUI will port over nicely.

Completing justCheckers

Yes, the project that I left for dead still lives.  I want to work on it, as portfolio material.  I first plan on building a website in PHP (or maybe JSP?) that renders beautiful CSS and XHTML.  And then I need to give the project much love.  But I owe it to myself to finish this application.  I won’t build any crazy game servers.  But I want to make something totally configurable and fun.  And in the process I want to create something that proves that I am a strong Java developer.

Writing A Collection of Shards

I am going back to writing.  Unfortunately I need to start almost from scratch, since many of my written sections simply will not work.  The ideas are there.  I just need to get them down on paper.

Driving License

This one is the ultimate in the tire kicking sense.  I plan on getting my driver’s license really soon.  Aside from parking, I feel comfortable driving.  Once I figure out all this parking stuff, then I’ll be ready.  I’m exciting since this will give me a lot more mobility and flexiblity.  I’ll be able to solve a lot of problems and have even more time to do things in the day.  And I’ll be able to sleep and live in normal time periods.

I’m blogging this entry fairly late in the day today.  I will enjoy sleeping longer and missing being in the office before the sunrises.  At least I will enjoy these guilty pleasures for the next couple of weeks.  Hence my blogging schedule will be thrown out of whack.  But I don’t mind the extra sleep.  I am definitely less cranky and more productive.

I should pick a better time to write this.  But I need a creative outlet.  Fighting with Perl and web applications, and reading reams of documentation can wear a person out.  I look forward to taking a change from Java.  But Perl is not a pretty language.  You can easily write code that you can’t maintain.  At least not easily.  The same could be said about Python, C or C++.  Still Perl can easily win a code obfuscation contest.  And my Perl skills need work.  Still I welcome to the shift from Java and JSP to mixture of Perl and my firm’s in-house RAD tools.  Even if it means wading through tons and tons of documentation.

Another shift is writing I guess.  I’m doing more of it, and enjoying it.  The effort of writing novel still drags on.  I blame my compulsive reading of RSS feeds, and magazines.  Still I like to stay in touch with the parts of the tech world that I enjoy and see future promise.  Also other tasks hang over my head, so it can be difficult to concentrate at times.  Writing and coding projects seem to move at a glacial pace nowadays.  Still they move forward.  I need to shift in Qt, C++ and Python coding again.

Lastly I have a trip to plan and random life tasks to do.  I’m excited about the results obviously.  But such tasks often involve decisions that take time and some can be life-altering.  I’d prefer that the tasks would do themselves.  But unfortunately my not doing them, is just procrastination.  That is what I’m doing right now, procrastination by writing.  I should get back to work now.

Made the plunge today into FOSS development again. As I mentioned in my previous post, I considered and started work on the next version of justCheckers. There are a few reasons why I restarted the project. I want to play around with Java web technologies. I also want to experiment with project management and FOSS development, again. And I am emotional attached to the project.

One of the failures of my past involvement with the project, was the assumption that people would be as excited about the project as I was. I assumed that people would flock and essentially build my dream for me. I underestimated the challenge of motivating people and managing progress. Drafting an excellent design, a todo list and increasing communication throughput would result in vast source code contributions. Managing a non-commercial open source project turns out more complicated than that.

The future of justCheckers requires a more nimble approach. That is one of first task is to streamline developing the codebase.

As I mentioned the next version of justCheckers will use Java web technologies. The majority of work for version involves migrating the Swing GUI to JSP. Also I plan to refactor the code to use the Model-View-Controller pattern.

Part of streamlining the development process, includes a serious reduction on other activities. Since I am sole remaining developer, I decided to reflect in reality. My team members no longer contribute to the project. So I removed them from the team. Since I don’t have a team, I am also removing the team mailing lists. I never found the current mailing lists useful. Instead of that, I will come up with a simple way for the community to communicate with the project. It probably won’t be a world writable forum or wiki. I can’t be bothered with cleaning up spam.

I’ll keep you posted.

If you wish to contribute to justCheckers, please leave me a comment.

Technorati Tags: justcheckers, web development, project management, web technologies

I am currently looking for work, so if anyone is interested in a software developer or software engineer position please let me know. I have experience from university (finished my B.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto) and from my open source projects in:

• Java development.
• PHP and JSP scripting.
• Database (MySQL and SQL Server) programming.
• Technical, computer manual writing.
• Graphics: mostly Java AWT and SDL.
• Website development (XHTML, CSS and Javascript).

I am looking something that I can either do at home or commute to in Brampton, Mississauga or Toronto. So if anyone is interested please send me an email at:

dorian dot pula at gmail dot com.

Thanks in advance for all offers.