Liferay and Splunk – Beautiful Together

http://blog.ambientia.fi/2013/03/11/liferay-and-splunk-beautiful-together/

Agilehipit eivät vain saa sitä - vai saavatko sittenkin?

http://blog.ambientia.fi/2013/03/28/agilehipit-eivat-vain-saa-sita-vai-saavatko-sittenkin/

Sunday Evening Kata: Game of Life

I haven't lately wrote to this blog. Instead I have write some posts to my employers intranet, sadly in finnish. I might publish some of that stuff also here, but then audience is quite small, only programmer's among the  5,6 million finnish people. But now some coding stuff  I want to tell to you.

I have studied lately Android programming and at this year I'm also gonna do some Windows Phone (8) and iOS stuff also. One thing I want to develop is Game of Life for mobile phones. Algorithm is simple, but "playing" that game is quite entertaining and relaxing, I think. Also I needed some training with IntelliJ IDEA 12, which I bought just before The World End 2012. Lately I have used it for Grails development, but not much and I'm not comfortable with it, even though fellow developers all the time tell how great it is. I want to learn to work with it as fluently as I can use Eclipse in my daily work. I like IDEA and how it supports many platforms and features without installing anything afterwards.

Actually I have also history with it: at the beginning of the century I worked with web apps running on Weblogic 6.X (can't remember exact version number) and for that I used IntelliJ 3. Now it's version is 12! What I remember it was fastest and lightest full IDE on the market at that time and already then code inspections were pretty cool. Actually, I was one to choose which IDE to use and I chose IDEA over JBuilder and Eclipse. There were couple of guys still using UltraEdit and ANT combination and I had hard time to talk them over to use that more intelligent tool. (Even though I think UltraEdit is great tool for many purposes I believe there are better tools for Java development :))

TDD is thing which I want to master in couple of years. I use it daily, but still I have lot to learn in that "design" part of that method. I watched couple of Kent Becks screencasts (which were quiet nice, watching them you can actually see how Kent Beck does coding, not just how to TDD) and I wanted to test his ideas and techniques.

So there was a goal and this code kata and IntelliJ IDEA were tools. And here are results.

Happy coding,

-j

EDIT 26.1.2013

I noticed that my point of view to this problem was too technical in that first version (I was lookin that "grid" or 2 dimensional array). Now I'm implementing second version, from perspective of one cell and how it relates to other cells. I think this second version gonna be much simpler than first.

I Was There Too and Really Had a Good Time! (JFokus 2012)

http://blog.ambientia.fi/2012/02/23/i-was-there-too-and-really-had-a-good-time-jfokus-2012/

Saturday Night Kata: My First Code Kata, Part 2

Ok, It's sunday. But yesterday I wasn't in the mood for coding. I rather drank couple of beers and was in sauna, as we use to do in Finland.

So, I still had things to do with that KataBangOCR code kata like file handling, learning some Mockito stuff etc. Now It's (almost) done and results are here. Still have to think how to implement that fourth user story, but learning process is finished. Actually, I achieved all learning goals.

But now I have set some new goals. I want learn to use git-flow and it's easier to do it with some new project. Also, I'm reading this book now, and try I get some new ideas from there for implementing TDD. And I want to test those ideas when I'm doing some coding. You can't actually learn anything just by reading.

Luckily there are lots of things to do, if I don't invent some real project. But now I'll go to sleep...

See you and good night!

Saturday Night Kata: My First Code Kata, Part 1

I am ashamed to admit that I haven't done any code katas until last saturday. I train somehow regularly, do prototypes and pocs, but I have never picked any katas and just executed them in "kata way" (whatever that means). But now I had some stuff to learn and it seemed a good idea to use code kata to learn them.

And here are my goals:

1. Learn use Eclipse shortcuts better (mainly for executing unit tests and changing tabs and views).
2. Training TDD, I'm still novice in that (I think) so I need all training I can get.
3. Train mocking with Mockito. I have used it, but not so much, so I still need  some practise.
4. Test some basic Java 7 stuff, like switch -statement with Strings and try-with-resources statement.
5. Learn some basic Git commands and how to work with github.
6. May be test some new eclipse plugins, I haven't used before.

But first I had to find some kata to do, and of course I used Google and found my way to http://www.codingdojo.org/. There seems to be lots of interesting katas there. I picked KataBankOCR because in that I have to do some file handling too (resources) and I there are multiple parts and user stories to do (I needed some "big" project to cover all those goals I had. And writing simple parsers is always fun.

Now I have achieved part of those goals and results are here. I have still lots of things to do, but I learned some important things like set up Git -> github connection and how to use it. I also remember how to change tabs and execute test using shortcuts in Eclipse.  But there are still some things in my todo -list:

1. File handling (goal 4.)
2. Some refactoring (that switch statement in that parser class is ugly).
3. Maybe more tests.
4. Cover all use cases of course, we have to always make business people happy :)
5. Mockito stuff (I think I gonna use it in my file handling unit tests, but also have to create some integration test for that part too).

To Be Continued...

Getting the Message Out about Clean Code to HAMK

Check this out! (<- link to blog post)