The year 2014 is almost here so it’s time to take a look back and make some plans for the coming year. In 2013 the blog was a bit more active than previous years and I managed to put together 13 articles as I last year promised. Not one article per month but on average :) So let’s have a quick look what I wrote.
Looking back
The year 2013 in Rule of Tech was about programming and sysadmin stuff with a short visit to Fujitsu Forum 2013.
This year it was my third visit to Munich and Fujitsu Forum. With keynotes and breakout sessions the forum provided a view to human centric intelligent society and how the future might look like with technology trends like Internet of things. It was again nice to see other bloggers and the Fujitsu team, get some insights to ICT and not to forget the hands-ons with new LIFEBOOKS like U904 and T904 and new STYLISTIC tablets.
On software development I wrote on three main topics: testing, monitoring and documentation. In software development the code is one part but also it’s quality and testing it are also essential aspects to make it great. I learned some new tricks with testing Java EE applications and wrote how to start on web application test automation with Robot Framework. I planned to write about how to actually write some test cases but didn’t have the time.
It’s also good to remember that “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” (Lord Kelvin) so I covered it with article about monitoring Java EE application with JavaMelody. JavaMelody proved to be very handy tool to do monitoring in different levels and was quite easy to set up. It can show information about e.g. CPU and memory, HTTP requests, SQL queries, Spring beans and REST calls. And it is said that the overhead is so low that it can be enabled continuously even in production environments.
To get things easily documented I made my first Maven plugin which generates HTML pages from Markdown syntax. It isn’t yet on the central repository but I’m thinking on it. The source code is on GitHub.
As I have always wrote my blogs like they were my notebooks, I made short guides how to do stuff like transferring Linux install media to USB thumb drive and do a clean install of Windows 8 with an upgrade key. Simple things but things you often can’t remember how to do. And although I hope I don’t need to use JSF 1.2 anywhere anymore I wrote about patching RichFaces 3.3.3 AJAX.js for IE9.
On the sysadmin side I finally wrote about using PHP-FPM with Apache 2 on CentOS and howto set up LAMP stack on OS X. And as everything doesn’t run on PHP I also played with WebLogic Server and wrote how to auto restart Weblogic Server with Node Manager as Linux service and how to use WebLogic Maven Plug-In for deployment.
I’m quite satisfied about the articles I managed to make and especially about Robot Framework and JavaMelody which have been helpful on many occasions. During 2013 I also moved the blog to new VPS provider and although there was also an idea to make a new custom theme, it didn’t materialize. Maybe next year.
Planning ahead
For the coming year 2014 the plan, as usual, is to write approximately one article per month. Blog’s draft folder has some items about JavaScript and charts, Munin plugins and general software development and some sysadmin posts but it will be seen if they mature enough for full posts. I will maybe also write something about Sailfish OS development and Sailimgur.
So subscribe to the RSS feed and stay tuned. And if you can read Finnish check also my other blog. Will the new year be better than the previous? Who knows, but at least you can try your best to make that so.
Happy New Year!
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