Link zur Google-Maps Satellitenansicht von meinem Haus

Zwei Bilder als (Angeber-)Beweis: Auf dem ersten Photo stehe ich am Strand und photografiere das Meer, auf dem zweiten Photo habe ich mich umgedreht und knipse mein Haus (tuerkis)….

Weil die Moebel noch fehlten, ging es zum Essen die ersten Tage auf die Y-foermige Treppe. Inzwischen habe ich eine Schweizer Mitbewohner und doch etwas mehr als nur eine Stereo-Anlage im Wohnzimmer, aber die ersten zwei Wochen waren doch recht … karg…

Upon arrival in Manly, Dmitry, our revered JavaScrip-guru and general CSS&Typography fanatic introduced us to the wonderful world of Script-Craft, which included closures, prototypes and loose typing. Being hardcore backend Java-developers didn’t exactly give us a big advantage here — our heads were spinning, but we did pretty well on the exercises. Or so we think. Would you know how to:

Add to any number the function „times“ which will run some function N times.
(5).times(function () {alert(this);});

The original plan was to squeeze in 6.5 hours of presentations and exercises on JQuery, but to be honest, we only got to 5 hours. Let me explain: I blame the weather! Huge clouds were beginning to show on the horizon, so we ditched our plans (agile!) and hit the beach right after lunch. When we returned to lessons, our energy levels were quite low after that, so after Matt’s presentation of JQuery, and another hour of exercises we called it a day, and headed straight for a cold beer in a nearby bar.

The original article as seen on the Atlassian homepage:

Confluence Grand Day Out

Der Tempel steht wirklich in Australien, bei Geelong. Unsere Ueberraschung war ungefaehr so als haetten wir den Tempel in Wuppertal oder auch in Buxtehude gefunden, es war schon etwas unwirklich.

Spaziergang mit Caro von Bondi Beach nach Bronte Beach, vorbei an ca 100 Freiluft-Kunstwerken. Viele etwas seltsam, aber auch ein paar schoene dabei.

My goal was to come up with a AspectJ-based minimalist profiling solution, since regular profilers are too slow for production use, while the super-fast profiling by manually collecting statistics with System.currentTimeMillis (or nanoTime, that is) is really tedious. And tools like JaMon are nice, yet mess up the code as well. Enter AspectJ, which enables you to define rules on how to collect statistics and render those rules straight into the class files.

Apart from learning about AspecJ, I wanted to learn about how to create a plugin and a usermacro for Confluence, and to learn about recording loadtests with JMeter. Fedex Day starts at 14:00 on Wednesday, and each project has to be presented to the audience on Thursday at 16:00. So yes, that is quite a lot of learning for just 26 hours – I ended up coding until 4 in the morning, slept on the office couch until 8, and continued working, which altogether means I worked on my project for about 21 hours.

But, surprisingly, I did manage to achieve my goal!

Admittedly, he code is not documented, there is an ugly static reference instead of a nice Springbean, and I did not have time to optimize the code either. However, I did write plenty of tests, learned about AspectJ and Confluence plugins, recorded some nice JMeter tests, the overhead of the profiling is about 10% at the moment (because I profile MANY methods, not just the really important ones), and I even found two major bottlenecks in Confluence using my own profiler. How cool is that?

Ok, my project was nothing in comparison to the cool stuff others came up with. One-click blogging, making a Skype-phonecall to our Bamboo continuous integration servers, Jump-to-Confluence-page popup, and of course the winner, „JIRA on the Phone“ which allows you to link phone numbers of incoming support-calls to JIRA users, thus enabling you to see a customers issues even before you pick up the phone. And even to record the phone call and attach it to the JIRA issue. Haha, how cool is that? So, no need to be sad that I didn’t get any votes for my project, as long as I could learn about cool stuff and finish my project on time. But for the next Fedex day I will start collecting cool ideas well ahead…

Thanks to Gerhard, Thomas and Carlos for helping me with the AspectJ-vs-Maven2 integration. Not that I wanted to, but I also had to learn a lot about Maven2 extremely unreliant plugin system. Yuck.