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.
