Joshua Go

People who drive small cars sure have colorful personalities. Yesterday, on the way to work, I saw a Ford Focus with a license plate frame that said, "Don't laugh. It's paid for." It was refreshing to see someone being flashy about their financial responsibility — a quality which is rarely flaunted.

I enjoy the process of refactoring software — especially software that was written by other people. It forces me to understand things inside and out (which is a tough point to arrive at when all you do on that code is the occasional drive-by bug fix). On top of that, since the desired functionality is known already, it's all redesigning of the data model and writing code. There are fewer product-level questions that come up. The specification is pretty much set. For this particular project, though, I have the unique challenge of making the new design pass muster with multiple parties. People are picky and they always have something to say, so I took special care this time to anticipate any objections and address them so they'd get a better sense of my thought process. I've still had to make changes — and I make them gladly — but I've found that having to explain each decision I'm making generally serves to clarify my thought process. It certainly helps to have some ...

Ever since I started using Blogger, I've been looking for a decent, no-nonsense desktop client to write my posts. I personally find it to be a lot of hassle to load up a big, heavy web browser and log in to Blogger to make my posts. (To be fair, Drivel was quite excellent in the past, but doesn't look like it's maintained anymore.) After a little poking around at Google's API documentation, I am pleased to announce that I'm writing this post from a desktop application of my own making. It's a Java desktop application using Swing, so it will run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and any other major desktop platform with a Java runtime. So far, I can select from a list of blogs, write in post titles (to be friendly to those search engines), write post content, and submit new posts. It's really basic, but it's quite a milestone and a major motivator for me to at least have gotten this far. Soon to come on the feature front, I'm aiming for loading old posts ...