The thing I dislike most in software development is when they ask me to estimate how long a given project will take. I am about to start a new project so of course the first thing that is asked for is to do some research and try to figure out what the high level tasks of the project will be and estimate how long they will take. This seems like a reasonable thing to do as obviously if the company is going to invest a lot of money into a project they want to have sort of a guess how much the project is going to cost. Additionally if the scope of the work is outside the time frame in which they need the feature they can decide whether or not to limit the scope of the project or add resources to the project. So all in all I can see the need and the point of it, but I think I dislike it cause I am not very good at it.

For all the other Dr Who fans that might come across this I am taking a Massively Open Online Course about the show that starts in a week. If you are interesting in the show you should join me. You can sign up here. A link to the Facebook page is here.

As my Christmas vacation draws to a close I am starting to think of themes for 2015. Why themes and not goals or resolutions? Well I think resolutions are sort of setting yourself up for failure and goals are very rigid so I am going with more general themes.

• Obviously the first theme I am working towards will be updating this site at least once a week ideally with something technical that I have learned during the week or thoughts on a problem I am solving.
• Next on the agenda I would like to try to read more. I haven’t been reading as many books as I like to during 2014. But at the end of the year I have been picking up the pace a bit so I hope to read at least 2 books a month. My system I have been using is to try to get through 10% of a book a day on my kindle.
• I would like to spend more time doing stuff in Spring Boot this year. I have been reading Greg Turnquist’s Learning Spring Boot and it is a great book which I strongly recommend. He seems to lay out the information right when I want it in the book and has saved me tons of time that I would have spent digging in the docs for answers otherwise.
• Anyone who knows me know that I am not a big front end person, but as a full stack developer I need to know all the layers of the stack, so I think 2015 is the year that I need to learn Angular JS. I learned Knockout JS in 2014 and appreciated how much more productive it was for things than just jQuery and it seems to me that the market is all going Angular and people say it is more productive than knockout so it is time to give it a try.
• I am hoping to do some architectural updates at work. I am ready to get our stack upgraded (I want to be on Spring 4.1 and Java 8 at a minimum and ideally JPA 2.1 as well instead of 2.0). I always prefer to run the latest stuff so I will be working hard to make sure that I can do so. On that note I submitted a Jira for the issue holding me back on Spring 4.1 related to the aspectj-maven-plugin. With any luck I will be on Spring 4.1 at work within the next 2-3 weeks. Java 8 may take a bit longer as it is going to mean a container upgrade.

Anyway that is what I have come up with so far I am sure more things will apply as time goes on, but this is a good start to my year plan. Now to enjoy my final 2 days of vacation before I return to work.

I have been hearing a lot of talk about Bulletproof Coffee lately. I decided to take the plunge and give it a shot this morning as who doesn’t like a good body hack. I made mine with 1 Tbsp of Kerrygold butter which is the normal butter I eat anyway and 1 TBSP of virgin coconut oil. I ran it through the magic bullet to blend it and gave it a go.

So when I finally resurrected my domain after it being idle for probably about 10 years I was thinking oh I should just roll out google apps to host my email. Back in the day I ran haskovec.com off of a Sparc Server I had running I think Solaris 10 maybe, but I am not 100% sure on the version of Solaris anymore. I just ran it off of my DSL and I used dyndns to map the dynamic dns to my home DSL as I was too cheap to pay for a static IP. At that time I was running a postfix smtp server for email.

Here I am again messing around with wordpress.  Why?  Well I have been sitting on my domain name forever and not doing anything with it so it is one way to extract some value from it.  Another thing I was considering was that as I have moved up in my software career I find myself more and more in the role of mentoring newer developers and I feel like I can solidify the things I am learning myself by documenting some of the things I have come across.  It also allows me to ramble on about anything I want and who doesn’t like that?  So anyway I have decided to give this a go, we shall see if I stick with it, but here goes nothing…