Hello Blogosphere. It's been a busy couple of months; lots has happened. Aside from my extremely busy personal life, I've had a pretty fruitful career as well:
Soashable
The little project that could. I actually haven't had a chance to touch it since Feb (the night of my previous blog post). It's seen a healthy surge of traffic throughout March. I can say that I've reached my first attainable goal of 10,000 unique visits :). How soon till 100k? Let's try for this Summer.
There will surely be some time to work on this around the end of April or early May. The focus will be on improving documentation, polishing up the GUI, and making it scale. I have some fun ideas, but have no idea which ones I'll end up executing. I will not have a day job for a month or two this summer, so we'll see what kinds of progress I can make on it.
Another quick nugget: the technique I am using for the Soashable/Xmpp4Js webapp "launcher" is being added to the Jetty Maven plugin; I was excited to see that somebody picked up on it before I got around to creating a feature request :).
Day-Job
Perhaps the most interesting thing happening right now is my day job (yea, I know. wtf?). We've recently dropped a $20m vendor contract, and I am heading research on shifting from a procedural to a declarative rules engine. The prospective engine is JBoss Drools 4.0.
Drools is an extremely exciting piece of technology. I had been interested in it for some time, but had never been able to wrap my head around how it was different from a scripting language. I was recently introduced to logic and predicate calculus at University, and that primed me to accept the basis for declarative rules. Having the opportunity to experiment with Drools full time for a couple weeks and play with concrete examples got me the rest of the way there.
The JBoss Drools + BRMS + IDE tools blow all other OSS rules engines out of the water, hands down. The Drools team has their head on the right way when they talk about creating tools to strongly integrate process and business rules; that is really the missing link, and supposedly the value that a rules engine adds to business: transparency into the rules by non-technical folk.
I've amassed a huge collection of knowledge and resources in this area, much of which I've presented to the business team at work. I'm going to try to get permission to post some of my Drools propaganda here on my blog. My references are here: delicious / harlanji / drools.
From small business to large, there is a very very compelling case for business rules.
University
Okay, a bit more of a personal note. You can leave now if you wish :)
I moved on campus and sold my house and car this month. So-far I haven't looked back; all I need now is a moped 8-). I haven't had a chance to go out and get smashed at the local bars yet, but soon enough I'll make it down. It has been nice to feel like I'm integrating with student life, if only a little bit. I'm still only taking one course; this situation is a nice logical step between working full time and being a student full time. Which, by the way, I've informed my employer that I am leaving this June/July for the student life.
I'm excited to start taking Intro to Programming classes next year. For a for a long time the thought of taking that class was insulting, after having programmed for 10 years. But my attitude has chanced after looking into what really goes on in that class. I'm really excited by the prospect of learning algorithms and data structures and augmenting my existing practical knowledge of software engineering with a solid theoretical foundation. I think this shift in attitude has been across the board in my life. I'm less about proving how smart I am and more about taking things in as they come, and actually being a student of life.
I'm looking forward to learning advanced mathematics at least as much as programming. I'm convinced that the next big thing relies heavily on statistics; things like content suggestion, data mining, and otherwise filtering and relating the plethora of information from all different sources that we are bombarded with every day. Applications are already starting to emerge as nice features of popular sites, but I don't think we've scratched the surface in making all this data that we have useful. The connections between things in many cases is superficial and only related by a natural dimension. I have a research group in mine who I want to do undergrad research with.
Outside the realm of business and technology, I will take piano and German classes next year. I want to study abroad in Germany at some point (say, 2010), so I'll see if I can hook that up. And as far as piano goes, I want a nice leisure activity and I also want to see how it expands my mind.
It's an extremely exciting time in my life right now. I feel like I've broken free from my shackles of debt and ignorance and am completely free to expand my mind at the University and in life in general.
Cheers!