Gobble de Geek

So Rational Application Developer v6.0 is pretty much wrapped up now. Hopefully the last installable build spin happened on Monday and if so it means we won't have to smoke test v6 any more..... thank goodness as it is a resource drain for us.

Probably the major thing our group put into the v6 release was a completely re-written Web Diagram Editor (WDE). Users won't see much of a change, although I guess there are some fairly big changes in how we draw out the diagram but it is all eye candy. However, the major changes are all under the covers, the WDE is now very very extendable. What we have done is re architect the mechanism by which nodes and edges are recognized by the base WDE so that they are all contributions through a set of extension points. Extension points is one of the more cooler things that the Eclipse IDE framework has going for it.

Now we are starting to look at what we want to do for the next release..... then the powers that be will tell us what we are really going to be doing :-) We will probably end up updating our tooling to support the recently released Struts 1.2.4. We will also be beefing up our support for Java Server Faces (JSF). Hopefully we will also get real time artifact creation and modification going in the WDE.... that'll be fun.

The other possibility for me is that I leave the team I am in at the moment and take a tech team lead position that may be coming up....... who knows if this will all happen... the position is not there yet and it may not be me who gets it... but I think it'll be offered to me first if it does eventuate. This is making me ponder things a bit at the moment.... it'll open doors up for me but it will also close a few. It'll mean that I will have the 'manager = 'yes' flag set in the IBM personnel files and management is most definitely not where I want to go..... I mean, can you imagine spending your life either in a meeting, planning a meeting, or writing memo's about meetings you have just been to and never actually doing 'real' productive work.... OH MY GOD..... I'd sooner eat glass. But having said that, a tech lead job allegedly means you do stay technical. But from what I have observed it depends on you and how much you allow yourself to get sucked into the management quagmire.... I've seen a few good technical people allow themselves to be turned into management zombies. ( note, I'm making all the management digs to see how many of my Massey friends are actually reading this blog )


Soooooooo hopefully from what I have written above you can see why I normally choose not to talk about work to people. I read it back to myself and think it must be the most boring thing to have to sit and listen to. This is why when I am asked what I do, I normally reply "I'm a software engineer" and leave it at that. Most people say "ah", and move onto some other topic before I elaborate :-)