A new life ahead

It has been a while since I've written something here. Either by laziness or my notorious capability of ignoring the social media aspects of today's world, I know I have completely abandoned this blog.

What made me take the time to post now, then? To share that after 10+ years I am no longer an IBMer. It was a very hard decision and at the end the I've chosen what made sense for me and my family. At this moment I fell great, anxiously waiting for the start of my life. Honestly though, by the beginning of this week I was almost miserable: not for regretting the path that I was taking but to be taking it. It is hard to explain. IBM has been a second home, one that was opened to me just two weeks after I came to Canada. Oh well... I promised myself I wouldn't get emotional ;-)

So what lies ahead? In a few weeks I will join Oracle, working with the team that is creating the best Eclipse tooling for developers that have adopted Oracle technologies. Man, I am exited! First I will be back to daily interactions with my favourite framework and its related technologies. Second, I will have to learn an entire new world of enterprise-focused technologies! Lots of fun and hard work for the next months.

What a great EclipseCon!

As anyone on this planet knows, last week was EclipseCon time. As always, it was a great experience. Seriously... How many conferences can one discuss, during lunch, the double-checked locking pattern or how EMF could support facets? (thanks Eike and Kenn)

All talks I've attended were awesome. It's reinvigorating to see all the energy and technology happening behind Eclipse: from known technologies to hot topics like E4 and XText.

And it gets better! The people at the conference are simply fantastic. Just to name a few, it was great to chat with Nick, Chris, and Boris and to finally meet in person Tom, Kevin, Peter, and Paul Webster. There are many others that, although not listed here, have contributed to make last week a memory that will not fade away from my mind.

A bit more personal, I like to think that the EMF tutorial was well received. We chose to go deeper into several subjects instead of mechanically read all the slides. Unfortunately, because of that, we didn't cover all the material. The offer to be available to answer individual questions after the conference is still valid ;-)

I got some positive reviews for the modeled UI in e4 talk, which definitely doesn't seem to agree with the official numbers. I wonder if we were too "slide driven" while the folks attending were expecting to see more action. Or perhaps my delusional-self is correct and people did mistake the '+1' for the '-1' bucket. Oh well... I am sure we'll do better the next time.

Finally, a special thanks to Steve: I was peacefully seated at the closing event when he handed me a winning deck for Thursday's poker game. My son loved the RC boat and will enjoy playing with it on summer time.

Another finally... The EMF book was the first one to be sold out at EclipseCon! I had the pleasure to autograph a few copies. On the subject, EMF and modeling in general are everywhere. It is good to see something I helped built making others more productive ;-)

I am lazy!

It is annoying to feel compelled to start every post with "Wow... It has been a long time since I've posted something here". Of course one answer is "So don't". I'd rather think that some people would prefer to say "So post more". I am known for having an occasional delusional moment here and there, though ;-)

I believe one of the reasons that I don't update this blog as often as I wanted to, besides being insanely busy, is that, bottom line, I am a lazy person. Fortunately, a characteristic that would put me out of any work back 50 years ago, is actually something that should be rewarded on the software development world. Let me illustrate this with an example.

When I am heads down, working 15+ hours per day to develop an entire product or a complicated feature, I get extremely paranoid (way more than normal) about introducing regressions by entering a, or better, any new line of code. And testing everything all the time is too tiring (I started by saying that I am lazy, remember? ;-). So I usually choose to automate as many tests I can. Sure I have to invest some time putting together an automation strategy (usually based on JUnit). But after that, I just need to click a button and watch the JUnit progress bar go while I exercise the divine right of not doing anything for a few minutes - OK, I am lying: usually I am working on another portion of the code while the tests are running.

On my last endeavor, for example, testing the code consisted on executing 11 Java examples that invoke an API written to identify security issues on web applications by looking at their code and by interacting with them as a hacker would do. Each one of these Java applications run for about 2 to 10 minutes and produces a long log that has to be verified. After doing this by hand 3 times, my laziness kicked in and forced me to find an easier way to test my code. After one or two hours of JUnit fun, I had a class that, for a test method like the one below, executes the XYZ.class on a separate VM, collects the generated log, and compares it with a baseline I know is correct.

@Test
public void codeCoverageExample() throws Exception {
  runExampleAndCompareOutput(XYZ.class);
}

The comparison part was a bit tricky to implement because the logs have things like timestamps and temporary file paths that change from execution to execution. With some creativity and several regular expressions, I managed to circumvent all the issues and, like a famous black-turtle-neck-guy says, "BOOM" : the annoying tests were out of my way ;-)

I will write at least one more post pointing out cases in which being lazy was extremely valuable. I am already thinking about EMF related examples...

Actually, on a minor digression, is my passion for EMF the ultimate proof that I am lazy? After all, it does generate a bunch of the code that I would need to code by hand ;-)

I can't see the code I blog!

Today I was proudly showing my blog to Dave, a good friend from work. "Proudly" would be the perfect word if it also meant "embarrassed". While I consider myself an illiterate in multiple languages (after 7 years in Canada I haven't learned English yet and my Portuguese is starting to fade away), Dave is my "English hero". Not only he writes really well but also knows all the grammar rules that would explain "why one should use a comma here" for example. A typical case of knowing what to do and how to do it. Anyways, I am digressing...

When I was showing the blog to Dave, he pointed out that the chunks of code I wrote were not been properly displayed on his Windows box. After some digging, we found out that the culprit was the "fixed" font on my CSS. After changing it from

font-family: fixed, courier, courier new, times, times new, times new roman;

to

font-family: courier new, courier, fixed,  times, times new, times new roman;

everything worked just fine.

Perhaps I should show this to Nick, another good friend from work, from whom I've stolen... err... leveraged the CSS customizations.