What I’ve been up to lately

February 28, 2008

These deserves more than a twitter…

1. I just got my copy of Scott Davis’ “Groovy Recipes” book - I’ll be posting a review as soon as a I can. First impression is about a 8.5 out of 10.

2. Just came across this -> http://froth-and-java.blogspot.com/2007/06/html-screen-scraping-with-groovy.html <- didn’t know about tagsoup parser (seems very handy) and want to try some twitter scraping when it’s up for more than 5 minutes

3. Been doing a bit of flex/audio code for an idea I’m working on. I’m more impressed with it (flex) now than I was a year ago.

4. I have a collaborator for my book - hopefully we’ll have that wrapped up in the next few weeks and off to the publisher.

5. Doing some contract PHP dev work, adding new features to a poorly documented mish mash of PHP code. There were multiple attempts at abstracting business logic and presentation, but they’re not consistent and, imo, mostly wrong. Abstracting at a bad level is almost as bad as not abstracting at all. I’m throwing away about half the code, and have about half that thrown away functionality reimplemented in new objects with unit tests (about 50 so far). I should have another 20-30 tests written tomorrow which will round out the basic functionality, and I should be able to have most of the front-end redone to use the new classes before a Monday afternoon meeting. I couldn’t do this without getting to the point of saying ‘enough - I can not work with this code in its current state anymore’. After that it was easy. Mind you, I don’t have time to rebuild the entire thing (wish I did) but it’s coming along nicely.

Posted in Blogging, Book, Development, Flash/Flex, Grails, Groovy, Software, Testing, Web