“How do you drown a hipster?”… “In the mainstream” .. or so the Dad joke goes..
Well, these days, I have to be counted among the uncoolest programmers on the planet. Aside from the odd bit of Grails consulting work, and a few training ops, my current gigs have me moving between webapps apps written in JEE6 with JSF2/JPA and rich client apps written in C# with WPF/XAML.
These, my friends, are not the calling card of the hipster developer. They are, separately and together, some of the uncoolest stacks in the enterprise. But I consult in a Government town, integrating with some very disperate systems, so such mainstream-ness is to be expected.
And here’s the weirdness of this season of tremedous uncool-ness….
I’m currently enjoying programming more than I ever have!
And for the gold star, I think I’ve actually worked out why. In both environments (JSF2 and WPF), I’m working exclusively in components. Proper components - with properties, events, listeners and the like. This abstraction is gamechangingly productive for me! I think they call this encapsulation. You know, loose coupling, strong cohesion and all that. Why did I miss this component thing when it was all the rage? (though to be fair I did program VB for a while in the 90s… but that wasn’t quite the same!).
Primefaces is an astoundingly good JSF library, and WPF/XAML, whilst having quite the learning curve, is insanely flexible for rich client anything. The engineering backing both is first class. I’m certainly not leaving Grails behind, especially since the paint is still drying on the book.
So for the next season,my life is all about components and, for now, I’m loving every second.
Anyone else doing component stuff these days? Now where was that Bon Jovi cassette…