karniv0re's Journal: My Shiny New Developer Job

So I'm a shiny new developer. New, for sure. Shiny? ehhhh. I haven't
talked much about this job, but I think it would be fun to compare this
to my last one. Is the grass greener? Let's compare and contrast.

Pay - It is better here! I have been given a solid raise and bonus.
Plus, there are supposed to be incentives for completing projects.

Hours - About the same. Still working way too many hours, however, I can
at least get peace and quiet when I want it. Before, I always had the

BlackBerry chiming away.
Work - The work itself is a cross between horribly Enterprisey and kinda
cutting edge and cool. I am definitely learning stuff, which I really
wasn't before. The Enterprisey-ness of the whole thing sometimes leaves
me feeling helpless and confused. I'll understand it soon enough, but at
the moment, it is intimidating.

Team - My team is about the same as the last - some cool, some annoying.
One of them has the most annoying voice in the world.

Cube Neighbors - About the same. Though I don't have annoying
nose-blower guy, who may have been the worst thing ever, the surrounding
neighbors, who are mostly on the other team, are terrible. I don't know
why, I think it's because they're always talking about their mundane
bullshit, and I just don't like them as people.

Commute - Shorter, and I don't have to walk by the dregs! Plus, there is
a high class steakhouse/bar in the building with gorgeous women. Duh.
That qualifies as better.

Boss - Well, I'm working for my old boss, and I pretty much knew what
was coming with that, so I can't say I'm surprised. But it is still
better than the old boss.

The biggest challenges here, are learning the new technologies (Spring,
Maven, JiBX, Autonomy, Wicket, and many more), and trying to understand
the architecture and how it's laid out.

Well, I should say the biggest challenge is the tight deadlines coupled
with a lack of knowledge about the above. I've been spending a lot of
time outside of work here just trying to get an understanding of
everything. Shit's rough, yo.

But I think it's coming along. Just not as fast as any of us would like.
First, I learned Autonomy. It's really not too bad. It's a search
engine. You send it XML, or this proprietary IDX format (I'm doing XML)
and if all goes well, it indexes it! Then you have to configure it to
index on certain fields, tell it which fields are integer and date
fields, etc.

So to do that, you need to query a database and get information. We're
using Spring JDBC, which I think is kind of verbose, but I suppose it's
not as bad as regular old JDBC, which is all I've done before. But it's
certainly not as pretty as ColdFusion queries.

So after you've got your queries, you populate DTOs or Models with the
data. Then you send it off to Autonomy using their ACI API. Which is
just HttpClient wrapped in their own code.

Then, you need to be able to query it. To do that, you have to be able
to take XML and turn it back into the DTOs or Models. For that we use
JiBX. It's super unfriendly getting your JiBX XML file set up, because
it's all compile-time stuff, which means you don't get shit for debug
options. But if all goes well, JiBX will take that XML and automatically
turn it into a DTO or model object. That's pretty nice.

Then I started working with Wicket. This is the part I haven't been
looking forward to. At the moment, the biggest problem I'm having is
keeping everything straight in my head. Like, "Oh, where did I see the
call to .search()?" or "Where the fuck is the Spring context XML file
that instantiates that bean?!" Christ. That's the stuff that makes this
so slow. But it's coming along.

JRebel is nice.

I guess that's my update for now. I need to get back to coding.

Peace.