Rebirth of T-rex

It has been a long while for this blog to be quiet. In fact, I have been involved in a lot of learning since the past few weeks.

At work, as I was trying to port an existing prototype (that was running on Jakarta Tomcat) into IBM Webphere Portal, I bump into many obstacles as the architecture of Java Portlet is different from Java Servlets though Java Portlet is an extension to Java Servlets. After several attempts of trial and error in order to get the porting work, but to no avail, I decided to get back to the basic to start learning about Java Portlet API (JSR 168). I have found some good articles explaning about the specification, some with tutorial and so forth. From the new knowledge gained, I attempted to modify the prototype to try to reach my goal in porting it successfully in Webpshere Portal. Work continues...

Besides, CEO and the new Vice President, Engineer dropped and had a small discussion with all the senior (as in at least 1-2 years experience) employee they have just hired. We came to know about the new VP's background and introduce ourselves to him. CEO also notify us about the possiblities of changes that will happen in the company, in terms of our role and responsibilities. He also advised us not to be afraid of change, as this change will lead us to a better status.

After the session, I took the initiative to hold a informal online conference with a few of my colleagues to plan out some internal prototype to be done. The main objectives were to think of some new ideas, look and feels and new domain to be covered besides getting some of us start working on some application with our company's product. As I was gathering some opinion and feedbacks from some of my other colleagues, including my trainer and regional channel manager, the discussion became more formal. We decided to had a face to face discussion with our regional channel manager. She proposed us to attempt on either a prototype for domain that the company has not tried before or some internal applications that use our company product. She also agreed to gather feedbacks from Sales colleague on some commonly met issues, such a way we may craft something for them.

On the next day, my team (consulting team) lead called all team members for a discussion. My colleagues and I who were involved in the informal conference started to worry whether we have offended anyone. So we agreed to appologize on our mistake. When the team lead initiated the meeting, he started to brief us on the latest status about the team and some upcoming prototype and project to be worked on. As we are still waiting for the Sales team to get back to us, he told us to bear with him. Later, he praised us for initiating the internal prototype idea but advised us on some common requirements from customer, in which the customer usually wants us to develop a prototype that integrates with their backend, though we may have some domain specific prototype.

Towards the end of the week, I was called in to work with my trainer to improve the training material and process to 'enable' the developer, in such a way that upon the completion of the training, the participants are able to use our company's product to perform the development tasks. After some discussion with my trainer, he assigned me to prepare the sample code for the mini workshop, in which I have to improve the UI, adding more comments and also prepare another J2EE EJB component for data retrieval. I temporary halt my work on the Java Portlet API.

As this is the first time working on EJB and deploying the J2EE application in JBoss
application server, my progress didn't go well as planned as I was coding and deploying it manually. A lot of mistakes in the deployment descriptor consumes most of my time. I should have used tools like Lomboz or JBoss-IDE to assist me. Besides, I also stucked in one of the situation where the Container Managed Persistance (CMP) Entity Bean I developed refers to a table named 'user' in MySQL database always refers to a table named 'xuser' when I run the application. After quite a number of attempt, I only realized that I should not use the name 'user' as my database table name, since it may be referenced as the table that keeps the record of users for database authentication and 'xuser' is reference indeed. Thank god, I managed to task on EJB integration by afternoon today. Upon an informal review session, I
continue to work on the improvement of UI for the sample code.

During the weekend, I was chatting with my CTO over Yahoo Messenger and found that I need to learn up JNI for Java/COM communication. It's meant for one upcoming prototype that I will be working with my CTO for a company in Europe. I was so excited when I got to know the news. Because if things go well, I may stand a chance to go to Europe, but things are not confirmed. So, I will work hard enough to learn up the new technology and hope the company can close the deal.

Besides, I stayed back late yesterday trying to complete my task on the EJB integration for the training mini workshop. The new VP dropped in our office and we had a chat. He advised us some common practice on QA, debugging and testing skill. He also encouraged us to learn and make full us of Unified Modeling Language (UML), as it is not just a graphical 'tool' but it helps in project management too! I wasn't sure whether he mistaken me to someone, but he told me that I should learn this more and he is going to grow me in the new area. As we were walking towards his apartment (I went to my car), he advised me, don't 'over-manage', if there are 100 items in the project and only 10 which are critical or at higher risk, then just focus on that 10, otherwise you will ruin the project. He added, 'project management is like sales, speak the appropriate but not everything; we were consultant, that's why we tend to speak a lot in order to drive people to certain direction'. I agreed with what he said, but really wish to learn more from him.

I told myself, I really gained a lot of new insights in this new company and more to come. If I am growing as how I am growing within these two months, I am sure I will be able to be someone great in 3 years time!