21st July 2013: What's happening?

I am always looking to improve as a Software Engineer. To keep track of what I'm working on I've broken it down to the following categories:

• Languages: My day job is primarily Java so I like to use other languages for everything else.
• Frameworks: Usually tightly coupled to a language but becoming less so - especially for JVM based languages.
• Databases: The world is changing. No longer can you get away with relational database / SQL knowledge
• Craftsmanship: How do I go about producing better, more maintainable software as well as helping those around me to do the same.
• General knowledge: Keeping up with technological world takes some doing. I try to read a few articles a day and listen to podcasts.

I won't work on each category every week. Here's what I've been doing the last week:

Languages

At work I'm a complete Java head. Over the past few years I've primarily developed standalone multi-threaded server applications for financial companies. More recently I've been developing cloud based applications so been doing a lot more Java development where it is deployed to a container e.g tomcat.

For this reason, when not at work, I am completely avoiding Java. This week I've been learning to test Java applications using Groovy (ok ok so I didn't leave Java complete behind!) and been learning to unit test the logic in Gradle scripts using GroovyTest.

In addition to Groovy I've been working on Python this week. If you live in London you might be aware you can get Transport for London to send you your travel statements in CSV format. I've been writing a Python application to parse these and work out how much money I spend commuting to work. Blog posts coming about this but initial version on github: https://github.com/chbatey/oystergrep

Databases

Having worked with Cassandra a lot over the last six months I'm now exploring MongoDB. Leaving the relational world for the NoSQL world has been a great learning experience this year. I'll put up a comparison for Cassandra vs MongoDB soon. Cassandra is such a low level, developer must understand everything database so MongoDB is quite refreshing!

Craftsmanship

I've started doing katas again the last few weeks. I've started with sorting algorithms. I'm doing this quite quickly and in Python to further solidify my knowledge of the language. Here's merge sort: https://github.com/chbatey/kata_mergesort quicksort coming!

General Knowledge

Started going through the backlog of programming throwdown last few weeks: http://programmingthrowdown.blogspot.co.uk/. Not bad listening for the train, though I wish they spoke about games less!