the corner office

Right, tech review and ramble.

The year was technically varied on the work front, and I got my hands dirty with some interesting problems. I've not blogged much about them because, well, I'm lazy. I've been exposed to a lot of new things. Websphere Portal, WAS, DB2 and Content Manager, Lotus Forms, and even a dose of C# and .Net. Since moving to London, I'm getting to grips to varying degrees with stuff like Spring and Coherence and Oracle and even cranky old JBoss again. I've spent two months getting used to a continuous integration environment and I'm a convert.

On the home geekery front, I set myself a few goals to stay focused and not faff around as much as I did in 2006. My first goal was to get my blog app presentable and share the source, which I did. After that I planned to play with Eclipse RCP for a bit, before moving on to other geekish things. My motivation for that was wanting to get comfortable and productive with a GUI framework, and I thought I'd give RCP a go because I've (a) had so many false starts before, (b) use Eclipse for all my day to day development, and (c) nothing else really appealed.

Then Leo and reality arrived and so instead of taking a few months, I've ended up tinkering with Eclipse RCP for the remainder of the year. I'm still quite ambivalent about it, and don't consider myself particularly competent with the technology. I also played with Swing for a bit, but I just can't get excited about Swing either. The main RCP app I've been working on is a personal budgeting app. It's not finished and it never will be, but I'm chuffed with the its current capabilities and proof of the pudding, we now use it to stay on top of our finances. It's been a good learning experience, but now that it's passably useful, I'm less enthusiastic about doing anything more with it, which is telling.

So anyway, it's now into 2008. I'm in the mood for a change. I'm writing my final two Honours exams in Feb, so for the next month I'm doing bugger-all but study. After that, well, I'm still not entirely sure.