The beginnings # Once upon a time - actually, in late 2017-early 2018 - there was a QA/DevOps engineer named José who liked containers, Docker and worked for a company named Thinkwrap (that soon would become Pivotree) in Valencia, Spain.
José was responsible (among other things) for setting up integration and QA environments for multiple Hybris projects. Such environment, when being built in traditional way (from physical servers or VMs), normally requires quite a few pieces:
Miro Manifesto # Original text of the memo, written in February 2012 and shared with limited audience, until it surfaced up as main them of the planning meeting in December 2012.
This is an attempt to come up with better answers to the following questions:
what issues and challenges I see on our way ahead from the technology point of view and what needs to be done to address them where do I see my professional and personal career go over next 12 to 18 months and in long run how to best align those two streams In the spirit of my latest “back to the basics” obsession, it was written in Markdown format and in Vi, copied and pasted into Google Doc, btw.
This is reloaded version of my previous blog - or continuation of the fork.
First thing to start is to explain why did I do something quite contra-productive as relocate the blog and loose all the audience - however small it could have been.
It would seem that I like restarts and things reloaded. I did pick a new country to become new home for me and my family (if emigration is not a restart, what else is ?). Back in 2004 we have started Thinknostic to be "Montage Reloaded" - a new incarnation of the company I worked for before and liked it a lot. The same story repeats with blogging.
I was aching to blog about this since December 18th, when our system quietly and gently slipped into public visibility. Marked as Beta (thanks, Google for making this a legitimate way how to go live) it comfortably made it through Christmas shopping season into 2009.
Now when the site has been announced and mentioned few times in the media, I guess it's OK to mention it here too.
What is "it" ? A new, fresh eCommerce site selling music. A lots of really good music. Without any DRM or any other nonsense, as plain good high quality (mostly 320 kps) MP3's. The selection is actually very good - starting from several hundred thousands in December to several few million songs when full catalog is loaded. More great music being added every week.
After everything-but-quiet summer, things got even busier and we need to add more great people to our teams.
At the moment we're looking for
* Junior Java developers
* Intermediate Java developers
* Intermediate .Net developers
* Senior .Net developers
* Junior Graphics/UI/Multimedia Designer
Sorry - no teleworking, you must be local to apply. If you feel like fitting in - or know somebody in Ottawa that would fit, email Miro at thinknostic dot com ...
Introducing code review and pair programming has often an impact on relationships in the team - especially when a critique needs to be delivered. It takes great degree of experience on both sides to communicate defects in the code for both the reviewer as well as for the code author to get something useful out of it.
I found this at http://www.finetix.com/blogs/finetixblogs.html which can be helpful (page is 404-ing now, but I luckily saved it in Google Docs way back) :
I have already worked through full week solely on Mac and Leopard platform with excellent results. The productivity in using Java is actually higher, thanks to faster machine and Spaces allowing to have opened few Firefox windows with Spring documentation, terminals for Ant builds, Tomcat, Eclipse and Spype/Adium to keep in touch. Spaces is about as good as having multiple monitors - the ability of switching between both with mouse and keyboard fits well in my working habits.
I am in the middle of a non-computer related project. Last week we have decided to get rid of carpeting in my home office and library and to put in the hardwood floor. My wife picked the wood and color, I picked the contractor, with my son's help we moved out the furniture and the renovation started. The most painful thing was shutting down and disconnecting all the computers and servers - only the lonely router is hanging on the wall and suffering the dust and noise of the power tools. As result, my family is now server-less and until we finish and connect them back, we have to survive using the notebooks only. Fortunately, I have at least one notebook available for each household member, except the cat. Even more fortunately, she (the cat) does not mind.
My current client is multi-national company, headquartered in Ottawa with offices in USA and Europe. With teams all over the globe, the conference calls and network meetings are part of the game. This usually means Microsoft Netmeeting to share the screen and teleconference bridge for voice. Netmeeting usually works quite OK - except when it does not - for no obvious reason :-).
Thanks to Yugma, there is now better alternative. Yugma is Sanskrit word meaning "the state of being in unified collaboration" and also a name of a startup, offering teleconferencing product that aspires to unify colaboration between platforms. And they mean it, because their product runs on Windows, Linux and Mac and integrates with Skype to take care of the voice portion.
Hi, all Java gurus inside and outside of Thinknostic - I have a very interesting problem. Imagine the following situation: we have three existing Java Web applications, written back in 2000/2001, based on open source libraries of that time: Struts 0.9/1.0 and JSP 1.x (no JSTL) with Tiles for Web layer, Apache Torque for ORM, early version of Quartz for job scheduling, Jasper Reports for PDF reports and Freemarker as template engine for email creation. The application has been (and still is) in production for almost 7 years and works great. Now the customer is expanding the functionality and wants add several Ajax features - in short, version 2.0 is on the table.