New Year, New Plan
A new year dawns, and as is traditional we make a list of things we hope to achieve in the coming twelve months:
1. Move this site to Grails 2 and replace Morphia with the Mongo GORM plugin. This is already at an advanced stage, in fact it would be finished if the Mongo plugin would actually save my objects to Mongo! Not sure if I'm misunderstanding the plugin or if just doesn't work, as with most open source projects, documentation is sparse.
2. Finish and post the three half written blog posts lying around on my hard drive. There's a post about my experience thus far with Scala, another about the Play framework and a rant about Scrum in command and control organisations. I just need to stop procrastinating!
3. Post regular blog entries. There are rants that are 'better out than in' and, as I'm finding out with the Scala post, putting my thoughts in writing helps to clarify those thoughts no end.
4. Build some prototypes. There are three projects: two related to sports betting and another relating to mobile applications that will not benefit from any more specification. It's time to write some code and show them to the world. It's perfectly possible to have two of the three written and deployed by the end of the first quarter of 2012.
5. Build a mobile application. At it's simplest this would be a mobile version of blackenedsystems.com, but a more useful exercise would be a mobile application running against one of the prototypes mentioned above.
6. Learn C++ and QT. I started this in 2011, but as with most projects, other priorities knocked me off track.
7. Investigate Clojure. I have almost reached the conclusion that Scala is not the language for me. Is Clojure?
and last, but not least ...
8. Resurrect the eGamingPlatform. In 2011, I made the decision to rewrite the eGamingPlatform in Scala. I'm no longer certain this is the correct decision. I am now considering a complete code review with the aim of producing a second, cleaner, Java version of the code. Or at least, removing all the cruft that accumulated during the aborted usage of Hibernate, etc and returning to a pure object model based on Domain Driven Design principles. From there, I will look at AKKA (actors) as a concurrency solution, and possibly NEO4J as a datastore.
Let's see how much is achieved ...