So I come back to my desk the other day from lunch and lo and behold there is this huge box of Empirix software and manuals on my desk. Empirix is an automated load testing application which we use here at work, and I also happen to have nothing absolutely to do with. It’s been here for two days, and no one has claimed it or told me why I now have it. So, it’s been added to the collection of slinkies, pictures, Java books, and other assorted crap on my desk. Anybody interested? It’s probably worth a few hundred at least! (Disclaimer: If you’re reading this and you work at AA, no, I’m not actually promising to sell company property, I would never do that, I’d just take it home and keep it for myself!)

Well, I finally have a project to do. So I can, as Jai put it, quit my bitching about not having anything to do! We’re finally starting to convert from ATG Dynamo to IBM Websphere and are moving out of the Java dark ages from ATG-proprietary mechanisms like JHTML to J2EE standards. First up is converting to JSP and Struts for the presentation layer, which I get to be a part of. Cool stuff, and I’m finally back on track using and learning skillsets that are marketable in the real world.

After this project and the temporarily shelved project I’ve been working on are done, I’m interested in working in our group that works on kiosks and interactive voice recognition (the phone system). Having done web applications for five years, I’m interested in working with some different user/client experiences. You get stuck thinking too much in the idioms of the web interface day in and day out. That, and HTML/HTTP were never intended nor are truly capable of the client-server experience every major website tries to make them be today. So, I’d like to work with a UI more designed for how it is used (not sure how robust the IVR toolkit is, but the kiosks use Swing to run a client-side Java app). I’ve only worked once in a client-server environment, and never with a GUI environment other than HTML.

Between that and the opportunity to be a technical lead on product development, I imagine I’ll be interested and occupied for at least another year here. By then hopefully there will be projects, new technologies, or something to keep up my interest. Overall my enthusiasm for software development has waned, but as long as I’m here I’m going to do my best to enjoy it and learn something new.

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For the non-techies I’ll post something far more interesting soon, just wanted to expound on tech thoughts for a moment!