Medieval Programming

Seasons Greetings! Blogging from my MacBook, I wish everybody nice holidays and hopefully a relaxing week or two.

As a special present, my printed books arrived on Christmas Eve. I is truly amazing; a totally different feeling than seeing it as eBook and I am happy to say that I am very pleased with the book. Writing it was a great experience, and hope you like reading it, now that you have your Christmas time for reading

Because I was a good boy this year Santa brought me a Go board. Well it actually wasn’t Santa but my lovely Wife, thanks Marie

I learned Go from my colleague Georg and I really like it. The second part of that present, which my wife perhaps was not fully aware of, is that she now needs to play it with me.

… hello new office.

Today I was the last day in our old office located in the GuT – Gründer und Technologiezentrum (Center for Founders and Technology). It was a good place for codecentric to grow and I liked it there, even if it was very packed the last months. Also for some other companies this would be pretty empty, but we think creative minds need “caves and commons“. Places to rest, think and work alone, and places to gather, meet and work together.

The new office is a real gem. It is the old local court building of Solingen Ohligs. Built in the 19th century it has a long story to tell. And thanks to the huge effort a local investor put into the reconstruction of the old building it can tell its story and be a great office with a special style. Large mosaic floors, some antique furniture and a refurbished loft make an ideal housing for modern and ergonomic office furniture and equipment. It also allows to create a truly great working environment for agile software development.

Besides saying goodbye to the old office, i was there to also give a talk about Effective Java, 2nd edition from Josh Bloch. I presented some interesting and some strange ideas from the book, either hopefully having transferred some knowledge or even better encouraged my colleagues to read the book, because I think it is a must read for Java developers. So if you, dear reader, haven’t read the book yet, please read it

Have a peaceful christmas time, read you back on January 2nd after codecentric has moved into the new office, with a report from my new workplace.

The last work related task I closed today was the SpringSource certification exam. I had a course on Spring framework recently and because I like certifications I scheduled the exam for today. This time my score was a close one, but enough to pass
Here my new and much more pleasant ToDo list:

• Buy Christmas presents
• East cookies and spend time with family and cats
• Read some books
• Sleep long
• Play with my MacBook (donated by codecentric as prize for an internal contest)

I might write a small review on the MacBook, if I like. Thanks to my colleagues for voting for my talks so I could win it

I wish all my readers happy holidays, see you back soon.

Today is the day which i was working for the last months. Now I can rest and recharge my batteries, because also my winter vacation starts in 2 weeks.

December 1st – Rich Ajax Platform day
Today my book went into print! The last days were really fast moving. Right after Damon, my copy editor, made my English pleasant to read (Thanks for your patience, Damon!,) the book went to layout. Already shortly after that, I received the book cover and the content as PDF. This was then the first time I realized how the book will look like when holding it in your hand, and I was so happy about it. I can’t wait for the printed copies to arrive.
You can head right to my book website, or to your favorite bookstore to order. There is also an electronic version available from Apress directly.
Thanks to everybody involved, either by reading, answering questions, correcting my mistakes or just keeping me happy, you were of great help!

December 1st – symfony day
As you might know I am the release manager of symfony 1.2, and I am very proud to announce that symfony 1.2 is available as of today. This might be a little surprise for you, because we have never given this early date.
But this is not the only surprise the symfony core team has planned for you. You might be surprised as well that we updated the whole symfony book to contain Doctrine 1.0 and Propel 1.3 documentation.
Think that documentation should be anyway there? yes, but most open source projects forget about it, while we try not to forget about it too often To strengthen the support symfony gives to Doctrine and to make Doctrine easier to learn for people switching from Propel, Jonathan has just published the symfony+Doctrine Book.

Because today is December 1st we launched a new Advent calendar! Because the askeet was so popular and the reason for many people to join the symfony community, we felt it was time to redo it. The new Jobeet will guide you to create a fully functional, state of the art project using best practices and symfony 1.2. Because the lessons every day are designed not to last longer than an hour, you will create a full project in less than 24 hours. Don’t believe it? You will see!

To create more buzz for 1.2, I recently gave an interview for the German Technology Magazine iX, which will have an article about symfony in its January edition.