Software Development
March 30, 2005 @ 03:36 AMThis is just a rambling post…
Software is a strange industry. It’s a combination of art and science that you won’t find in a lot of industries. See, most developers think of themselves as artists. They build their art, line by line, section by section as any other artist. They imagine, they are inspired, and they code of gut instincts a lot of times. They, like any artist, look at an empty canvas and see what could be, what might be, what should be. And they work to make it be.
But development is also hard core science. It’s engineering. It’s building a structure, framework by framework, that must perform specific requirements under estimated likely stresses and achieve measurable results. It should be built on common best-practices and design patterns.
All that said, there are four Java User Groups (JUG) within reasonable distance to me that I’ve signed up for. Seattle, Olympia, Vancouver B.C., and Portland. Between the four of them, I hope to hit one or two every month that interest me. I really believe that networking is one of the most important aspects to being a software developer. They tell you that’s the best way to get jobs, but even beyond that, it keeps one in the loop with regards to technology, best-practices, and even other events and ways to network further.
In April I plan on hitting both the Seattle and Portland JUGs. SeaJUG will be discussing AJAX, which is really just a fancy name for the new (or old-but-new-again) method of web development recently made popular by the geniuses at Google (see the scrolling features of maps.google.com, or Google Suggest). AJAX stands for “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”. A bit of a stretch, eh? Yeah. Well, us developers love our acronyms. Anyway, PJUG will be discussing JDO in J2EE. I’ve never used JDO or Hibernate, but I was under the impression that Hibernate was going to largely replace JDO. Of course, JDO is an official spec, while Hibernate is a product. Similar to JavaServer Faces (spec) and Struts (product).
Oh well, enough rambling, back to work.