I finished reading through the first Pragmatic Programmer book this weekend. It is quite an inspiring read if you are a programmer and have a passion for what you do for a living. If you are a project manager, it can provide a few pointers as well as a great deal of insight as to what you should expect and encourage in the developers on your team.

I plan to implement a number of the Agile/Pragmatic methodologies on my current project at work. I will journal the results of them here.

I was on the .Mac site several days ago, trying to see what freebies might help defray the $100 they received from me last September. It doesn’t look very hopeful. There was this puzzle game that was free, so I downloaded it. Luckily, my wife loves jigsaw puzzles, so that was a hit with her. There was also this demo of Nanosaur II: Hatching, from Pangea Software.

It was a fun demo, and there is a discount for .Mac members. So, I figured what the heck and went for it. I think they have me figured out; I will end up spending hundreds of dollars to get discounts that will only partially defray the cost of the .Mac service.

This is a pretty cool game. The graphics are really impressive. It can apparently be played in 3D, though I think my Lasik surgery has forever ruined my capacity for this, just like binoculars and microscopes. I am a gaming novice at best, but I can say that the quality of the graphics and the accuracy of the flight motions is pretty impressive.

Of course, this also means that I am nowhere near as far in my books as I had hoped for the week… 8^)

My Pragmatic Programmer books came in the mail today. Since I have the next week off from the J2EE study group, I decided to make my first pass through at least the original book. I am behind on EJB and design patterns, but these books hold so much promise for rubber-meets-the-road applicability that I can’t wait.

Just the first few chapters are great. It’s the kind of material that makes you wish you had come across it years ago. As each section is stepped through, an experienced developer with enough history on projects will find themselves identifying with every point, whether good or bad.

I think Dave and Andy have much to offer anyone involved with software development. Never before have I seen so much insight distilled into such a compact form. I am sure I will be writing about these books more as I progress.

I now have my first Java-related presentation behind me. The JCA presentation went well. I was a bit nervous about the presentation, mostly because there are a fair number of really experienced people in the group. I am pretty wiped out, so this is about all I can manage to write before crashing.

So I am reading through my study group material for Java Connector Architecture, learning about all the things you can do with it. At the end of the material, I basically find out that it is so laborious that it mostly pays off only for vendors who are going to provide a JCA adapter for their enterprise information system and resell it to many customers. Somewhat of a let-down, really.