Fun With Projects!

Way back in the day, around April or so, I was talking about a project which was taking up my time. Yes, it is still coming along nicely. We're playing nice with ActiveMQ, Java, the whole bit.

It has taken awhile to get as far as I have. It isn't that the underlying concept is all that difficult ("index files"), it is the scale at which I want to do it. So, there's been a lot of internal abstraction going on, with all of the attendant complexity (lots of little files).

What I'm really happy about is the overall process I've been following. I've been a proponent of tests and mocks, and I've used them a lot in my projects before. The one mistake I always made, that everyone always makes, is losing discipline - giving into the urge to cut a corner. After all, I won't need a mock for that class, it's too simple, right?

I haven't done that this time around. It is really paying off. I haven't been able to devote 100% of my time to this, so I've walked away more than once. I have had no trouble picking up where I was. New pieces work excellently with older pieces, and I barely question the predictability of anything I've done so far.

There's more work to do, of course. I see the light at the end of the tunnel, though. There's some obvious performance changes I can make, but once I've got the basic "duplicate files" functionality going, I'll post it all someplace.