Thanks Apple..

..for feeling you should screw me as a loyal customer with a hardware refresh less than 6 months after I bought my "new" iPad..

Another PaaS in the wall?

I received a LinkedIn invite recently to try out a new PaaS service called Uhuru (www.uhurucloud.com). I haven't played with cloud VM's and services before, mainly due to time and interest constraints, but hey what the heck, I had an hour or so to kill...

After a painless signup, you are presented with this screen:



It's pretty sparse stuff at the moment. You can push a bunch of pre-packed modules, which are the usual mix of CRM/PHP applications, create/rename/remove your Cloud and define services; the following are available:

And this is as far as you would get from the web based UI. In order to do any real work, you'd need to use their .NET GUI, or a command line client; and this is one of my first gripes. Seeing as they call this bit a "Service" , I would expect a wider mix of types here e.g. a Java web app container. All things being equal, I would prefer if I could deploy from the web and the command line, and dispense with the .NET local GUI.

Using the .NET GUI has been a mixed experience. It's clearly rough around the edges, but mostly functional. It will now and then get mixed up when you delete a deployed App and keep displaying it's status as "DELETING", although it's been removed from the tree at the left hand side.

Deploying is fairly easy. Right click on apps, select "Push" and you are presented with this menu:

You can define your framework or have the GUI detect it for you. It did get my app type wrong though, more on it shortly. Once you've defined your app and tied it to the services it requires, it's time to push and that's that...

Or not. Unfortunately, as of the time of writing this, I've not been able to deploy an albeit non-trivial web app, but with a very standard WAR structure; The command line client was equally cryptic

 and therein lie my gripes:

• The UI and command line need much better feedback. I simply got a failure to push the app and had no idea why.
• You cannot push an exploded WAR. I see no real reason why this should not be possible
• The GUI got my application type wrong; it thought it was a Spring app just by virtue of it having an applicationContext.xml
• I cannot edit the Tomcat server.xml properties so no DataSource access via JNDI.
• I cannot create a DB once my instance has spun up, but I can drop the existing one.

These things aside, the whole premise looks promising. Of course, there's the little issue of a pricing structure, especially given the big bull in the corner (hello Amazon) but it's early days.

New-New beginnings

I've been in a new job for the past few weeks now and I'm enjoying it. I got to play with stuff I haven't touched in ages, and although not my forte, it's fun. The first couple of weeks are quite curious for me, as I felt my new colleagues are sizing me up (maybe that's the paranoia talking, hello!). 

I usually don't want to pipe up too much, in case nonsense comes out of my mouth, as it tends to happen when I am nervous. However, the odd thing that has happened is that I started feeling a heck of a lot more confident as time went by, something which took a long,long,long time in my previous job. There's a refreshing lack of ego from everyone so far and my opinion is actively sought after, which is great. Even though it's a very traditional sort of organisation, in terms of development processes, they are very open-minded and will try new things if the justification is there.

Of course, the shine may eventually wear off and I might sing a different tune, but for the time being, all is good.

On interviews

I was recently called up for a couple of job interviews. One of them looks very promising, both are with financial institutions. Now, anyone who knows me (well) will tell you this about me:

I hate interviews, with a passion.

The night before one, I will pace endlessly, sleep fitfully, wake up with my head buzzing like a swarm of bees on acid. I will actually arrive at least 45 mins before, so that I can calm the hell down. Which doesn't really work all that well as I will get agitated again, the moment I start making my way to the doors. 
Once I meet the interviewer and we exchange pleasantries, I await for the moment the dreaded test is wheeled out; at which point I feel like Han Solo on the interrogation slab, before Darth Vader. Quick check at my armpits and yes, I am sweating buckets and the sensation of a deep unpleasant heat develops at the pit of my stomach, even before I've looked at the questions.


I've tried to reason why, many times, and it's a deep seated anxiety. I believe it stems from these three things:

• I always compare myself with the better person than me, and naturally find I am falling short.
• I forget things.
• I hate humiliation.

The last one is a killer. I dont enjoy making a fool of myself, and I always want to have the answers for things I'm supposed to be a damn professional at. So I take it as a major personal failing when I can't fully (or at all) answer something.


So, you can imagine what happened when I was given a written test and asked to comment on a piece of code on the fly. 


You probably think I soiled my pants.


I didn't.


I aced it, and I have no idea how. The information came readily available to me, I was fully answering what I knew, and taking an intelligent guess at what I didn't. Maybe this is a turning point for me, maybe this is a one off, but even if I dont get the job (one more interview to go) for one day, I felt so damn good about myself and my knowledge.

On books..

A recent spate of self-loathing prompted me to post the following on Twitter:

The more I read @joshbloch 's books the more I want to sit in a corner rocking back and forth, mumbling "my code sucks" ad infinitum..

I didn't expect anyone in particular to answer or comment, I was merely railing against my own inadequacies. Yet an hour later  I received this

@idiotmonkeycodr Sorry.  That wasn't my plan.  FWIW, I learned most of those lessons the hard way. 

Holy shit..I peed myself because Josh Bloch deemed my bullshit worthy enough of a response (ok a little bit of hero worship in play here). However, I almost instantly realised, I had actually inadvertently offended him. Here's someone who put a lot of fucking effort in producing books that are concise and well-read and some shit comes along and complains (albeit obliquely) that they point out the major suck-age in his code.

This all comes down to the fact that I feel very defensive about what I code, because I know my initial drafts are going to be bullshit, so to read how things should be done, makes me feel embarrassed to call myself a developer (coupled with my bizarre inability to absorb and retain information, I've read Effective Java probably 5 times now, from cover to cover, and I still cannot recall most of the nuggets of wisdom contained therein).

I guess Google telling me (politely) to fuck off has seriously dented my confidence..

HT on...HT off

HT turned off...moderately slow under load
HT turned on...face meltingly slow under the weight of a fart
May I please be allowed go in a corner and head-butt the wall to death?

4 years later

Sigh..feels like 4 years was yesterday. When the spectre of middle age wasn't waving to me from a distance. When I thought I would actually be working for a job that made me genuinely excited to be there.
What a bunch of sh*t.
I tell you what, interview rejection is a bitch. Not in general, but in particular, for the job you really really wanted. I've tried The Search Overlords twice so far. I've failed, miserably in both attempts. The second one was an online test, <bitterness on>the ones which really tell your examiner if you know your arse from your elbow and whether you are a good software designer <bitterness off>. It doesn't help I go to pieces each time I face a coding exercise. I usually need a little more time, nay, a lot more time, than they allow, but obviously that's never going to happen.

By the end of, I wanted to lay my head on the floor, hold my laptop over my head and let it fall on my face. Pointy side first.

"We will not be proceeding with your application". Yep, I knew that about halfway through the exercise.

I don't think I'm a bad coder, it kills me though that apparently I'm nowhere near the level of brilliance they are after, it makes me feel inadequate, and I start second-guessing my everyday work. I haven't slept properly since the fail-fest, I go to sleep with code in my head, and I wake up with a splitting headache, and the promise of a punishing day..

Maybe next year...