Development @ Home

As someone who used to program for a living (I am now on the dark side as a manager), I have to satisfy my programming urges at home.  This usually means I start a whole bunch of little projects and never actually get them finished.

Most of my recent work has been in Java.  I still consider myself an advanced novice as I am very familiar with a lot of design concepts but I don't have the time and experience with the languages and the packages available to necessarily do it the best way I can.

I also tend to use my home development environment to learn about tools and processes I might use elsewhere (work for example).  For example I am using a large part of the Atlassian suite of products (JIRA, Fisheye, Confluence, Bamboo) under their starter license program to experiment safely at home.  I have to admit it is slightly overkill but it is a safe place to play.  Along those same lines I am using this as a place to learn about Git and Maven as well.

What this all tends to translate into is a fairly complete development environment (oh yeah, I use Eclipse too) which may or may not be setup up correctly.  My normal cycle usually involves choosing an issue to work on (I am using JIRA for issue tracking,  remember?).  Mylyn is plugin within Eclipse which integrates with JIRA and allows me to focus my work and "state" on the task at hand.

While I am working on the issue, I tend to commit to my local Git repository at appropriate times during the session.  If at the end of the session I am satisfied that I have a working copy or if I am finished with a particular issue, I also push my git repository upstream to my remote repository and build server.  Bamboo which is running on that server will kick of a build and assuming that work, I am officially done.

I forgot..

So I guess the experiment succeeded and the subject died.  If I thought I was going to remember to add to this blog on a regular basis, I forgot.
On the other hand, I am going to give it another try.  I have currently divided my attempt at blogging into 3 groups.  I have my poker blog, I have an internal work related blog and this one.
I have been doing some home based programing/learning/experimenting and I figure this is as good a place as any to ramble on about it.
I will try to write about the environment and what I am trying to accomplish next time.

Introduction

I wanted to start this off with an introduction and outline how I see myself using this blog.  In order to put that in perspective I need to write a little about myself and my background.

I consider myself to be more geeky than not (which is the play from the title of the blog).  I have always been into technology from before being geeky was as mainstream as it is today.  I started off in the electronics field (as a technician) before I learned enough about computers to be dangerous.  I went back to school to get my BSc in Computer Science so that I could officially claim to be a software engineer or computer scientist (you pick the term).

When I retired from the military I started my own business, originally we were the first commercial internet provider in our city.  That part of the business was sold off to a competitor, mainly to get out of what was becoming too much of a commodity, and we continued for about 7 years as a embedded software consulting firm.

When we decided to shut down the business and basically go into self employment I ended up following a contract down here to Southern California.  That turned into full time employment and a green card.  Last year I changed jobs to a different company where I am currently the Software Development Manager for a couple different product lines.  I like to this of this job as herding cats.

Over the last couple years I have also swapped money around with others while playing online poker - I look at it that way because I don't really win that much more than I lose but I have fun doing.  I recently resumed writing in my poker blog about those experiences.

I see this blog being random writings about things technical - probably mainly software but it will probably wander away from that now and again as various shiny things catch my attention.