11001001

What a strange trip it has been.

Two weeks ago I got a call from an IT Mercenary outfit and my former employer wanted to bring me in for a face-to-face. This isn't the first time that my former employer and I have sniffed out each other but this is the first time that something came of it.

It appears that on 28 Dec I will be going back to my former employer doing the exact same gig (for now) as a contractor via the above mentioned IT Mercenary firm. It's not a bad rate and it is W2 with a benefits option. The only loss is vacation/sick time. However, if I work 60 hours in a week I get paid for 60 hours. I'll have to wait and see how that goes.

So, I've been away for roughly 19 months. What have I really done in that time?

Agile Project Management

Does Agile work? Yes and no from what I've seen first hand. It can work if management allows it to work. I've also seen Agile as an abstraction for sales. I worked for a firm that shouted Agile from the rooftops but did not allow it's own projects to run in an agile fashion. Agile was squashed for tyrannical project management with tacit upper management approval, developers opinions and experience be damned.

Alternative Load Testing Frameworks

I got a lot of good work in with Microsoft's load testing tool. Microsoft really needs to have a better naming scheme for it's testing tools. When you say, "LoadRunner" you don't have to explain it too much. Most people know that LoadRunner is for performance testing. Sure, they might not know how it works, but they know it has something to do with performance testing. The Microsoft solution? Visual Studio 2008 Team System Test Edition. That's a tadbit verbose. Sure, you know it's Visual Studio and that it is for the Team Edition and hey, you know it's with the Testing Edition. But still, hardly anybody really knows what the hell it does or how it does it. Visual Studio 2008 Team System Test Edition Coded Web Test is just too verbose. Try doing some job searches on indeed.com for "Visual Studio 2008 Team System Test Edition Coded Web Test" and see how many hits you get versus the generic "LoadRunner."

I also got to mess around a lot with JMeter. I found JMeter to be handy little tool. I felt a little constrained by the GUI nature of JMeter but still, it gets the job done and has more protocols available than the Microsoft Tool. I preferred the Microsoft tool as I could develop virtual users in C# versus JMeter use of GUI elements and beanshell coding for extraction and correlation.

While not a performance testing tool, I did get to play with QTP a bit. I'd like to get to know QTP better. It seems to be a real handy tool. I'm also excited by the UI testing tool that will be part of VS2010, as well.

Deployment Tools

I got to mess around with tools like NAnt, MSBuild and WiX. Of the three I prefer NAnt but generally the XML files get very tiresome. I'm still a perl kind of guy at heart but of the three I prefer NAnt. I got to extend NAnt with objects created for MSBuild via a wrapper which was nifty and solved a problem.

Project Planning

For a project that I worked on for the Veterans Administration I gutted and re-wrote the performance engineering plan. The end document was over 90 pages of generic performance testing documentation.

Capacity Analysis Tools

Again for the Veterans Administration I did a comparison of different capacity analysis tools and techniques and the way of combining the efforts of performance testing and capacity analysis and trending. I found the books by Neil Gunther to be most excellent along with the PDQ API. While TeamQuest Model is popular I found the interface to be extremely clunky. It reminded me of VB4/Powerbuilder era interfaces.

In the past I've done plenty of empirical capacity analysis based upon my load testing results and observations of production systems but this was the first time that I learned the math behind heuristic queuing analysis and the various tools related to queuing theory.

Of all the things that I learned on my little adventure I think that this ranks near the top in terms of importance and application to future endeavors. It really is quite handy and goes hand-in-hand with performance testing. For my last position I recommended the Python versis of PDQ, PyDQ. I selected PyDQ because I like the clean duck typing syntax of Python coupled with the available IDEs for Windows and Linux.

The Joys of Virtualization

I used Hyper-V and VirtualBox on a lot of projects. Virtualization just plain rocks. Prototyping complete systems is just incredibly cool. I found the snapshot system of Hyper-V to be better performing than VirtualBox but VirtualBox is much more flexible as VirtualBox is not bound to Windows 2008. When I was testing deployment scripts with NAnt, Hyper-V was invaluable. Test, check results, fix, rollback and test again. Fabulous! Both Hyper-V R2 and VirtualBox 3.1 support live motion of VMs which is pretty cool. I really hope that Oracle doesn't kill off VirtualBox. VirtualBox just rocks.

I used VirtualBox to build a JMS prototype system with multiple clients processing messages. For another learning experience I had built an OpenSolaris server exporting an iSCSI target. I learned that ZFS is one of the greatest file systems that I have ever used. Really cool stuff.

Python

For some of the capacity analysis tools I needed to learn Python and I found that I liked what I found. I've done some Python development in the past (early 2000s) but never did follow up as I used perl for what I needed. Python led to learning Django and my desire to further learn MVC with different frameworks. I also played around a lot with different Python development platforms like Eclipse with PyDev and NetBeans with support for Python. Pretty darn cool.

Java

For the VA project I did a bit of JMS and Swing development in Java. I've never done any Java development and I started to learn Java development. I'm now continuing learning Java in continuing education courses at the local community college. While I may not be utilizing Java right now it's a good thing to learn. I would have liked to have done more JMS development but alas, that was put on the back burner when my project was coming to an end in favor of the Swing development. I've never been much of a GUI developer and still don't have any major desire to do front ends. In my heart I'm a command line kinda guy.

I covered metrics collection and tuning of J2EE apps but I've only truly done J2SE development. The VA project was supposed to expose me to WebLogic but unfortunately that never came to fruition. I've already forgotten all the Oracle training that I crammed into my brain the first few weeks of being on the project.

R

I had the opportunity to do some R development to aid in number crunching and I found R to be very handy. If I do a lot of statistical number crunching I'm more likely to do it in R than I am do write perl routines to get the same results. I especially like the built in graphing capabilities of R both in quality and ability to generate jpg and PDF results. I started out learning R as part of PDQ-R but ultimately for the project I was working on I selected PyDQ, the Python implementation of PDQ for the robustness and the widely available IDEs for Python both under Windows and Linux.

Skill Development

In the November time frame I had a job interview and while I did good on the CS portion of the interview (math, algorithms analysis, etc) I bombed the actual coding portion. The coding portion of the interview was using C# to solve a problem using interfaces. I've implemented interfaces in the past but this solution was using interfaces in a way that I had never used them. That told me that it was time to start developing my coding skill set. I've been taking some Java classes at the local community college and have plans to continue with the advanced Java class along with Hibernate and Spring. Also covered will be Ruby on Rails.

Working from Home

I worked from home for 11 months and I've decided that working from home sucks. I am not a homebody and get cabin fever easily. Face to face communication is definitely better than phone conference meetings with 15 people. I found Skype to be real handy for voice conferencing with 1-800 numbers. Working from home wasn't good for my waist line either. I'm looking to getting back into a regular work routine and making the use of the facility gym with my old trainer and utilizing the running track again once I've dropped a few pounds. Sure, I got up to a 405 pound machine bench press (useful for throwing developers over cube walls) but I've let the old BF% get up too high. Bah!

Working on Government Projects

I've worked on government projects before, specifically USAF and DoD stuff but this was the first time that I worked on a VA project. Oy! What a mess. Remember the messed up logistics systems from when you were in the US Army and twist the entropy knob to eleven. Yeah, it was really that bad. The sad thing was that the project I was working on was supposed to help those veterans that put their lives on the line for their country and this was the best that could be done? I shudder to think of Guvment Health Care being ran like the project that I was on.

Books

Here is a short list of books that I found to be handy:

Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ
Guerrilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services
Performance by Design: Computer Capacity Planning By Example
The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources
The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance
Pro Java EE 5 Performance Management and Optimization

What's next? Who knows? Can't wait to find out.