Back

I disappeared around June for a number of reasons and some were great. My son was born and my free time disappeared pretty fast. I am not complaining at all either. My wife and I are always amazed by how wonderful we find him. Blogs take a sideline to one’s children every time.

Another occurred a couple weeks later when I switched jobs. That was a dumb move on my part. Dumb doesn’t really describe what a bad move that was. New jobs have a certain level of stress in general. Being sleep deprived and having to function well with people who don’t know you is a real test. Writing code that works is somewhat more striking.

I spent the past six months writing an application using JBoss’s Seam. That’s a bundle of JSF, Richfaces, Hibernate, EJB 3 and some custom Seam components together. I have this belief that JSF is not the road to web application victory and there will be a post where I try not to rant about it. I have the feeling we will look back at JSF and JSF -based frameworks in the same way we look at EJB 2.0: negatively.

I’ve also been reflecting on the current market and the recession. I’ve looked back at “Being a Developer During a Recession” at regular intervals and want to write so much more. Being laid-off back then was really a difficult time and I was single. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like now with a wife and son. My heart goes out to all the laid off folk right now.

There is a lot of code to write about too. Seam is rich with strange stuff, weird behaviors and traps like nothing I have every encountered. I had this Seam or Safari bug where rerendering a section of a page that contains links with more than one parameter would cause the ampersand character to be converted into its escape character. I ended up have to use javascript method to invoke those urls. I have had to write lots of workarounds.

Lots of architectural things to talk about. Documenting and conveying concepts is a huge one. Key aspects to successfully communicating your ideas to a team. How to listen to your team and accept feedback and incorporate it into your design. That last one has a couple of stories that you just wouldn’t think would happen and yet they did. I’m still surprised at some of the things.

So I’m back at last and I plan on writing a lot.