I already mentioned my side projects - JSXP and gclimbing - a couple of times. Now I have decided to start a series of posts which will describe several aspects of these projects in greater detail.

One of the reasons why I started a regular posting schedule on this blog is that I want to improve my English writing skills. Please help me with that! If something I wrote is bad grammar, spelled incorrectly or poorly worded, please leave a comment (but be kind).

This is a follow up to my blog post “Software Developer” blog post. Although I consider myself to be a programmer, not all programmers are software developers (as I described the term in the earlier post).

In the past, time and again I met people who were good (even excellent) programmers, but definitely no software developers. Some knew everything about C++ and used everything in their programs. Even in ways C++ was not intended to be used, just because they could. It was almost impossible to read their code, and they refused to write it in a way that was easier to understand. Because anybody who could not read the code was obviously not a good programmer in their opinion.

When somebody asks me what I do for a living, I say “I am a software developer” - or occasionally “I am a programmer”. I do not use fancy words like “principal software engineer” or “senior solution architect” or “system designer”. This posting is not meant as bragging or an advertisment, I just want to make a point: I develop software, so I am a software developer. (*)

I have just finished reading “The Passionate Programmer - Createing a remarkable career in software development” by Chad Fowler. Wow, what a great book! I can highly recommend reading it to everybody who has something to do with software development.

I wish I had invented something like twitter, back then, when nobody knew twitter. Oh, wait, I had! Kind of…

Pretty much everybody agrees that ideas are worthless. Most people I know think that you need the right idea at the right time. They know that there needs to be more than an idea, but they still think the idea is the major part of success. That’s wrong, of course :) An idea can be a good start but it will not nearly be enough. The idea and the right time might not matter that much at all.

Update: I have new written a short article about JSXP2.

When Oliver Szymanski and I started to work on JSXP it was not the first web framework. Or the second. Or the … you get the point. In fact we had the idea when we driving home from a JSF conference. We were discussing Apache Wicket on the train. There were plenty of web frameworks for Java, and there were lots of other nice technologies for creating web pages (PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP.net, …).

I have just uploaded a new version of DSync, my simple directory synchronization tool. You can read more about it in the original announcement of DSync. Download it here:

DSync-v01ds05.jar

I have had this version in use for a couple of weeks now, and it worked without major problems. I have still not packaged up the source code in a distributable form, but if anybody is interested, just contact me.

Update: The article “Java: Reflection-Annotation-Class not found problem” (previously available under this URL) can be found in the archive.

Programming - especially in Java or .NET - often seems overly complicated to me. I know complex problems sometimes require complex solutions. I am ok with that. It can be fun to work on a complex problem, even if it yields a complex solution. It can even be fun to read and maintain such a complex solution when it is written well. But complex does not necessarily mean complicated.

I do have a problem with frameworks that require complicated programs. This is the reason why Oliver Szymanski and I created the direct call pattern. This is why we created JSXP. But that is not the topic of this blog post. I will write more about the design principles of JSXP in a later post (Update I now wrote that promised blog entry about the history of JSXP). This blog post is about “accidentally complicated” programming.

I use the word “hacker” for “genius programmer” and “hacking” for “programming and having fun”. A “hack” is for me an extraordinarily good piece of code. Eric S. Raymond and Paul Graham also talk a lot about “hacker culture” and how “hacker” does not mean to break into computers.