I've dived into blogging... don't know how much it will last but we'll see. When will someone actually read one of these entries...? I'm curious.
Anyway, I've finally had some time to do some reading of other bloggers. It all started for me on Cedric's blog (http://freeroller.net/page/cbeust) even though I'd read Dave Wieners' for a while. Cedric used to write articles in an Amiga magazine a couple years ago. When I saw his name as a contributor to an EJB book a year ago when I was in a Toronto bookstore, it rang a bell so I went to his site... which in turn led to his blog.
From there on, I discovered the web of interconnected blogs... it's interesting how discussions start, arguments are thrown. It seems that in this subspace of the blogging universe, a couple of themes are being actively discussed. One of them is AOP, the other is pair programming and XP in general.
* AOP I read about about 2 years ago, a little after the first articles started getting published and AspectJ was starting to look like something. After spending a few hours on it, I figured it needed a bit more maturing. As I go back to it now and look at what people are saying about it today I can only think of one thing : too complicated. I don't believe that it can really be used by a team of average programmers... at least not in a creative sense where a programmer/senior developer will decide that it's a good way to implement a feature. Maybe it can be included in a big project through ready-made design patterns (for tracing, for object persistence or others). I think mastering something like EJB and J2EE is proving a challenge to many software engineers even though it is not nearly as abstractly complicated as AOP.
* I read Kent Beck's white book in October 2000 and was fascinated and profundly interested by what he described. To me it looked like the answers to all questions (I was only 24 at the time!) and I looked forward to applying all of his precepts as soon as possible : no documentation, refactoring, giving the power back the developer, feeling confident thanks to great unit test coverage. Two years later and now that I am responsible for a (small) team of diversly-talented developers, I feel like reality is setting in. I think Kent must have described a situation & project in flow. This is a concept that describes groups that are uniquely centered around the same goal as well as highly productive. It usually applies to sportsmen/women. I have however wholly embraced his idea of unit testing, continuous integration and refactoring mercifully. I have also successfully applied ideas like very short iterations and flexibility in terms of what should be implemented. However, it does mean that you have to have a group of developers that is sharply focused and very able... this is by no means the usual case...
Ok, enough for the first post... lot's of things I want to talk about : test-first, EJB, mocking, Hibernate... Let's see if someone picks this blog up and starts a discussion