Long week…

This week has been interesting… we had a BOATLOAD of meetings that were pretty frustrating to be in at work this week, however it was contrasted by a return to development for me.

I learned many things about Java GUI design this week. We have the good fortune to have an extremely skilled developer in our group that has some GUI background, and let me tell you… it makes a difference to have someone that is trained in proper design patterns show you how to develop interfaces. All of the tutorials on the internet make Java GUI development this long obfuscated mess. If you break it down to its component pieces it is actually a very intellegent, elegant way to put together interfaces quickly.

I had a lot of fun getting into that, and I also discovered a new Open Source tool named XStream for serializing objects to and from XML. This was one of the major sticking points for me when developing serializable objects in straight Java, and after some investigation I got this thing working inside of an hour. It would’ve gone faster if I didn’t have 10 people come up to my desk during that hour. Literally, five minutes of coding for something that would’ve taken me hours to develop on my own.

So I felt pretty productive for a Friday. I’m looking forward to this long three day weekend, despite the fact that it is already filling up pretty quickly for me. I really want to get the last tasks finished on my table so I can enjoy that and reclaim my garage, but I don’t know if it will be in the cards for this weekend. We shall see.