Since my last update here I received an awesome offer for a job at Sigma IT and Management as a consultant and couldn’t help but to jump on that train. Right now it feels pretty sweet to get a crash course into the industry after all those years in the academia! Highlights with this whole consultant thing include that you’re encouraged to get certified in relevant technologies and can request courses you would like to take. For example, as my current aim is to get certified in Java and related technologies, me and some fellow consultants at Sigma will attend a three day course on Spring technologies in Gothemburg.

Apart from the boring book I’m reading to prepare for the Java certification exam – which contains the really ugly and obscure parts of the language that you most probably won’t come across but need to know for the test – I’ve read quite a lot of books on system development and programming. The one that probably inspired me the most was Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans. Many chapters maintain a fairly high conceptual level compared to many other books for developers; when you see code samples they commonly aim to exemplify a concept or idea, e.g. the supplied patterns (or building blocks) to facilitate DDD. I buy the entire argument of keeping analysis and design very close together – potentially seeing them as one – in order to not lose or misinterpret domain knowledge gained during analysis in the design and implementation efforts. Related to this argument is the concept of the ubiquitous language, a shared language based on the domain model that is used to communicate domain knowledge consistently between members of a team (or company). Through exploiting the object oriented modeling paradigm (or any other that might fit) the domain model can be implemented using concepts from the ubiquitous language. In my opinion it makes perfect sense to make use the OO paradigm to design and implement the domain model as closely as possible, i.e. avoid to make domain objects mere data containers without behavior.

Other books I enjoyed during late summer was Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by the infamous Martin Fowler and The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. The former contains plenty of useful patterns that I most certainly will look up when needed while the latter suggests and instructs how to keep a pragmatic approach to programming. I can warmly recommend them both!

At the moment I am digging throguh Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch as I have been told that it is a gold mine for Java developers, and judging by the first 100 pages I have a lot of neat stuff to look forward to. Hrm this was a long post, better stop now before I make it even longer.

Over and out!

Some months of half-time work at Fortnox has now passed which means that I have had some time to reflect on my professional life style change. The awesomeness of being free after working hours is hard to explain; I now have the option to tend to family matters, play World of Warcraft, improve my cooking skills etcetera. When thinking about it I have been studying at the university in one form or another since 2003. Phew. No wonder I needed a change for a while.

During my doctoral studies I often found myself working evenings and weekends. There were conference papers that had to be authored, boring student assignments that had to be corrected, tedious project work – rarely connected to my doctoral studies – had to be completed in time. The pace in which all these various balls were tossed around made the whole research environment stressful and not very fun. And learning new stuff should be fun. Towards the end of my studies, right after I had finished my licentiate degree, I often found myself checking out things to deepen my skills in areas that I had been interested in for a long time. It did not have much to do with my research, but what the heck. It was fun and I had found the spark again to learn.

I am a bit surprised that, while I nowadays have the option to slack through evenings, I actively spend free time to deepen and renew my skills in software development. For example, can you name the principles object oriented design? I must say that was a valuable resource for me. In some ways I guess the thirst for understanding is a sickness (or skill if you will) that comes from having spent a lot of time in research. You need to learn new stuff and try out the stuff you learnt. The main difference from before is that now I can learn the stuff that I want to learn for the moment, in my own pace. My focus right now is on software architectures, making efforts to properly understand patterns on different architectural levels. After reading through an introduction to domain driven design I actually ordered Evans’ book. Looking forward to dig into it when it arrives later this week!

After several weeks of stressful work and late nights I finally managed to wrap up a first draft of my licentiate thesis with the working title “An approach to promote semantic interoperability of emerging learning object metadata”. Although it feels nice to take a step back and let the text rest for a while I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about the whole thing right now. I mean, from my perspective the thesis is quite nice and contains all the stuff you’re supposed to have in a thesis. The only problem I have with my perspective is that it’s not at all objective but rather biased, and lacks any prior experience from dissertation authoring, which makes it unreliable to say the least. So at the moment I try my best to enjoy the calm before the storm. The first draft was actually due a week ago, but as an article me and two of my colleagues wrote for ICALT 2009 had been recommended for submission to the IEEE TLT journal we decided to focus on that one. In my (again biased) viewpoint the paper now has a more clear message and overall a more solid argumentation. Anyhow, better get back to my coffee before it gets too cold, laters!

Back on track again after the holidays during which I have spent most of my time cursing my poor Prolog skills in a course about artificial intelligence. Unfortunately the last assignment in the course was a bit too time consuming for the hectic schedule of a Ph D student, but hopefully it is possible to present it at a later stage. Today I picked up my early draft of my licentiate thesis again to continue on the theory part of the cape. The master plan is to have a somewhat readable version of the cape in mid February..hrm yeah well we will see about that. Alongside of the thesis I am polishing the camera ready version of our contribution to the WMUTE 2010 conference, which to my relief got accepted as a full paper..finally I have all my articles in place for my lic! In the paper we elaborate on the potential of using Linked Data to enrich UGC (User Generated Content) with RDF and interconnect systems supporting TEL via the data level, and for my future studies I aim to realise these ideas in real settings at our research centre. Besides the WMUTE contribution, our best paper award for the paper we presented at ICALT 2009 have payed off; we have been invited to publish an extended version of the paper as a journal article in the IEEE TLT. This feels really exciting and we are currently working on a prototype experiment in order to improve the validity of the original paper. Our aim is to have something submittable during January/February this year. Alright better get back to my lic, have a nice day!