The year 2015 is almost here so it’s time to take a short review what I wrote this year and plan for the next. In 2014 I managed to wrote almost monthly and got together total of 14 articles covering topics of software development, WebLogic issues, Sailfish OS, user experience and gadgets. Last year I planned to write one post per month and in average I got there. Have to be satisfied with it although I could write more.
Looking back
During the past couple of years I have taken part of Fujitsu’s campaigns and testing their laptops and tablets and last year I took part of Master your Business project and tested Lifebook U904 Ultrabook. It’s slim and quite robust laptop with brilliant touch screen although it could benefit from better design regarding cooling. In Autumn I was invited to visit Fujitsu Forum in Munich to hear more about Fujitsu’s services and get insights about what’s new in information technology. The article from the event is still on my draft list. It was nice trip and great to see other bloggers and the project team. In other gadget related topics I also solved my problem with connecting Jabra HALO2 headset with Windows 7. I just had to update Bluetooth drivers in my Dell.
As a software developer I decided to challenge myself last year with developing applications for mobile phones and started with Sailfish OS which runs in Jolla. With Qt, QML and JavaScript it was fun and relatively easy to make useful apps like Sailimgur for browsing imgur and Haikala for reading high.fi news. I also made Colordots game which I ported from Ubuntu Touch. I planned to write more about how to develop apps for Sailfish OS but got around just to cover Sailfish OS user interface design practices and in more technical detail how to debug power consumption issues.
At work I do different kinds of software development related tasks and it’s good to write about the issues I find and how to solve those, like how to use X11 forwarding in Windows when I needed to install Oracle Database to Linux server. I also wrote about Oracle WebLogic related issues like how to recover managed server in incompatible state and what’s wrong with LDAP provider getting stuck.
Developing Java EE applications includes many tools and one of them is Maven which work quite fine for us. E.g. you can use WebLogic Maven plug-in to deploy your application and make your own plugins to generate HTML documentation from Markdown. And if you want to distribute your project’ artifacts to the world you can put it to the Maven Central with OSSRH.
I have been following Atlassian’s Sven Peter in Twitter about how to better do software development so it was great to finally get to hear the talk live when Atlassian’s Get Git Right landed to Helsinki. It was nice event although it had also the marketing aspect about Atlassian’s tools. Nice tools but sometimes the cost is too much. Now I just hope we move from Subversion to Git someday.
I also wrote short article about using Java Mission Control to monitor and profile your Java application. Too bad it’s really useful only with newer JDKs so legacy apps have to use other means like JavaMelody or NewRelic. I also took a short look at stagemonitor but didn’t yet write about it. Looked quite nice for monitoring but not as easy to setup as JavaMelody. Also Spring Boot had nice statistics out of the box but more about that next year.
Planning for 2015
As you may have noticed I’m not a very active writer and technical topics take time to get out from draft to a full article. In the past three years I have managed to write on average one article per month and it seems to be a good target to pursue. Why change something that works quite fine?
For the coming year, looking at blog’s draft folder there’s posts about Sailfish OS and Windows Phone development, software monitoring, setting up continuous integration, utilizing PaaS and starting with Spring Boot. I should just stop starting and start finishing my personal projects so I could add the finishing touches to drafts.
So, stay tuned and subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. Check also my other blog in Finnish.
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