The Art of Being Dorian

Hmm… unfortunately it seems I can no longer achieve much when pulling an all-nighter, as I did in university.  In fact, I feel I maybe less productive due to the sleepiness that comes with sleep deprivation.  (Talk about pointing out the obvious.)  Anyways this week, I’m trying to catch up on work at home, while learning about Spring MVC at work and trying to push forward my projects.  So far, the effort hasn’t really produced much in terms of progress on my projects.  But I’ll see if I slide them during the day.  Anyways, I’ll keep the post for today short and sweet.  I have a lot of writing to do, and I need to plan and execute a technical demo for a prospective client.  Hopefully today, I can push at least a few things forward.

I must sound like someone who just discovered America, but… Since I got to experiment with Spring, TestNG, serialization, Java6′s support for annotations and ExtJS, I’m enjoying developing web applications. I’m sure the novelty will wear off soon enough. I’ll meet that perfect bug that will drive me crazy and I’ll learn to hate all this Web 2.0 stuff. But in the meantime, I’m happy. Why?

Spring

Spring by itself intrigues me, and looks like an elegantly designed web framework. I’m still learning to use and understand it. Its forcing me to learn about design patterns and different forms of programming that I’m not used to. I know about Visitors, Factories, and other basic patterns from university. I’ve worked with Model-View-Controller (MVC) on previous professional projects. But Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control are totally new beasts for me. That and I need overcome my aversion to trusting a complex system to configure itself.

TestNG

I have not seriously worked in test driven development since university. I’ve done the occasional unit test suite with JUnit. TestNG feels more refined than JUnit and cleaner. What excites me the most is the prospect of working systematically with unit tests. Passing a battery of tests, reassures me that my code works according to my desires and mathematical theory and not to the whims of the rest of the universe.

Annotations

I’m infected with the urge to annotate all my code. The code looks cleaner, even if annotations potentially can introduce phenomenal cross-cutting problems. I don’t know why but there is a satisfying feeling to adding a list of @ annotations to a class. Yes, I know I’m crazy. Whoever introduced annotations to Java, you are awesome!

Ok, I’m doing with my lavish praises. I wish I knew about all these things earlier. Thanks to Nik, my project’s lead dev for introducing me to this new world of web development.

I lean my shovel, against the icy snow lining the bottom of my driveway. Exhaustion clouds my thoughts. At least I have defeated the mechanical monstrosity called the snowplough truck. This time maybe it will not come for a while.

I watch the dirty brown trickle of melt water, as it skirts the melting floes. The steady sound of the trickle falling down the rusty rainwater grate, calms my mind. The tired, muddy ice hides the silent arrival of long awaited friend. Only the trickle whispers in my ear, “Spring is coming.”

The world swirls around me. The mountain of ice shrinks before my eyes. The sound of bird fills the air. Spring. The icy citadels of Winter’s harsh rule shrink and dissipate into the warm air. Trees blossoms and grass grows and the sun melts the last of the snow. Spring. A time of a new beginning.

Only I stand shrouded in a icy sheath. My heart encased in my frozen body, shimmers slightly. The shimmer can not melt the icy sheath. Neither can the sun. Who will unable melt my being? When will my soul’s eternal winter end?

I turn away. The ice and snow returns. The slushy floes melt slowly. As I walk away, I hear the trickle of meltwater whisper in my ear, “Spring is coming.”

Originally posted: Saturday, March 3, 2007 @ 08:44

Author’s comments: Shoveling snow can really wind you. And then you get strange ideas… like this one I had. My deoxygenated brain seems to come with strange, colourful delusions. Now if only I could write properly when not under the influence of sleep deprivation, caffeine or excessive snow shoveling. This was the last post of the One-Time Trash Pad project.