Greg’s Place

I received an email from Dr. Eric Lander today about his appointment as co-chair to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology today. Then I noticed it on CNN as well. As an employee at the Broad Institute, I’m both thrilled and proud of his achievement. I still remember one of the first “Broad 101″ lectures I attended – and I had not met Dr. Lander yet. I kept thinking, ‘who is this strange guy asking all these questions?’ I’ve learned a lot from those questions and I’m thankful to him, his questions, and the poor presenters who tried to answer them.

So, Eclipse was driving me nuts today. While trying to load up the hibernate console in the JBossIDE, it kept failing with a class cast exception due to incompatible javas versions and telling me it was using java 1.4.2. I had upgraded to 1.5 many weeks ago and this was frustrating. I googled a bit and found this page on switching the CurrentJDK link. I was unaware of this pesky problem. I had set JAVA_HOME to 1.5, used the apple java switcher to point to 1.5, but apparently that’s not enough. This link also has to point to 1.5. That resolved my class cast exceptions … now to resolve some others

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions

sudo ln -fhsv 1.5.0 CurrentJDK

On the work front, I’ve been enjoying my new job tremendously. I’m working for the Broad Institute which is affiliated with Harvard and MIT. I came in under the MIT side of the house, so I’m officially an MIT employee. I’m working as a software engineer doing web-based applications for the labs. My first project revolves around a brand new biological sample tracking application. The app is all java 1.5 on jboss. They use all sorts of technologies, mostly hibernate/struts. We’re using Stripes for the presentation layer, which is much easier to work with than Struts. I like the idea of using event handlers as annotations … i.e. a form submission in a jsp can be mapped directly to a method in a java class.

So far, the work is reasonable and there’s plenty to do. I’m very impressed with the level of intelligence of just about everyone I’ve met. Most of the java folks are well-versed in genetics and lab management. My biology background is pretty weak, so I’m a bit over my head in that area, but I’m finding the work to be just about perfect. It’s the first time I’ve been able to work with java 1.5, so that is a blessing now.

The downside is that I miss my walk across the common and the public garden each day, and I also miss my former co-workers. There are some real talented folks back at Pearson that I’m glad I had the chance to work with, and I already miss them. I might be able to alter my commuting routine to get some more walking in, but it’s hard to make time to get together with folks from the old office. Bernie and Ed did drop by a couple weeks ago and we had a blast. I hope we can make some time to get together again.

Another big change is that I’m working on a mac laptop now for all of my development. I love the fact that I can just take the laptop with me when I have to catch the train and pick right up where I left off when I get on the commuter rail. I’m finding development pretty comfortable with Eclipse for the mac and BBEdit. JBoss and Tomcat run perfectly. I found this great utility (from YouSoftware) that lets me create multiple desktops and then you can switch between them from the menu bar. This helps a lot with the cluttered desktop that is a hazard with macs. If there is one thing I don’t like is the lack of a decent window management system built into OSX. There is the F9 and F10 thing, but that’s a still a little awkward if you have more than ten windows open. So far, I like to have one desktop for development and one for email.

Well, today’s my birthday, and also the first snowfall of the season. It started out pretty light, a mix of rain and snow really, but by nightfall, we had about a quarter-inch on the ground.

The other batch of news revolves around work. I’ve been searching for a new position for a little while now, since early September, really. It’s been a tremendously enlightening process compared to all of my previous searches. I started out focusing in the academic arena after a good friend of mine had recently moved from an administrative position to a faculty one.

From the very beginning, I received lots of calls from recruiters and head-hunters. I’ve worked with many of them before, and had very poor luck. This time, however, two companies really pulled through. So far, I’ve had second interviews with four companies through these two recruiters, and it looks like two might make offers.

It was my first round of efforts, though, that have delivered. Although the academic world is a bit slow at taking these steps, the Broad Institute at MIT made a very decent offer yesterday. I’m very excited about the opportunity … it’s definitely my top choice at the present.

These companies that I had second interviews at seem like very solid places in case anyone else might be interested:

• Rapid7
• XRefer
• PHTCorp (they still have the typo on their home page)
• Shoebuy

So, some of the concerns I’ve had and things I’ve been looking for revolve around quite a few factors. My current position is as a lead web developer for a product that was built over four years ago and a significant portion of the code is from that era. Over the years, newer technologies like hibernate and struts have been bolted on which have helped quite a bit, but the underlying architecture is fairly dated. Not much is going to change either, so it’s really fairly limited in terms of developing in newer architectures.

Another factor for looking is the current work situation. It looks more and more like our division is looking to shed the development operations here in Boston. We were re-org-ed from Prentice Hall and Scott Foresman to a group that is based out of Mesa AZ. From that point on, it’s become more and more clear that remote operations (i.e. Boston) are less and less viable. For instance, our supervisor moved to Mesa this summer. One of the other two developers left for another company too. That left me and one other in the office. There is no new development now as well. There is only bug fixes and updates to the legacy system until the newly re-architected version is released next year.

More later … it’s getting late

(Updated 10/30/05) A third consideration revolves around development itself. We are two developers, a remote development server, and QA/stage environments. There’s not too much in the vein of refactoring old code, learning from one another, automated testing routines, or significant support for the various server environments. It’s becoming more clear that there’s little money to put into this part of the ’system’, so it has steadily devolved to its present point. In publishing, the budget is based on the discipline. That discipline has the cash … so they call the shots. Not too many folks care about what’s required for a solid development environment, so few resources go that route. Instead, all efforts are focused on the feature that department X is paying for, and lately, to the detriment of the existing code. It’s also clear that for me to move beyond this, I need to be in an environment that takes this part of the process more seriously.

Lastly, how can I estimate the impact of old friends? Steve Tello, a good friend and mentor from UML, has moved to a faculty position after many years directing the helm of the UMass system’s online education program. His dedication to academia and personal commitment to education were very strong motivators for me to return to the world of education.

Here we go!