Raible Designs

What's Next

It's been three weeks since I joined the realm of the unemployed. Fortunately, I didn't stay unemployed for long. In fact, after writing the aforementioned post, I received 5 offers the next day. Of the opportunities I received, the most interesting ones were those from companies interested in hiring the whole team. Not only that, but LinkedIn hired me back as a contractor through the end of the year. The goal of the LinkedIn contract: finish up projects that my team had started in the previous months.

At the end of the first week after the LinkedIn layoffs, we all had individual opportunities, but we also had two team opportunities. The following week (last week), I flew to NYC to meet with one potential client while the other potential client flew to Denver to meet with the rest of the team. After flying to NYC, I traveled to Mountain View to do some on-site work at LinkedIn. At the end of the week, it seemed like most of the remaining tasks at LinkedIn could be done by someone else. I told them I thought it was best that I move onto other things, while staying available for support questions. On the way to the airport, I spoke with both our team opportunities. Following those conversations, I was very pumped about both projects and confident about pending offers. You can imagine my disappointment when my flight was delayed for 5 hours.

After a fun weekend with Abbie, Jack and friends, I woke up Monday morning without a job and it felt great. However, things changed quickly. Monday morning many opportunities landed in my inbox: a 3-day gig this week (helping write open-source training), a 1-week gig in December (evaluating how well Tapestry 5, Wicket and Struts 2 integrate with Dojo/Comet for a client in Europe), a 1-week training gig in Europe next year and a 3-month gig for the whole team. I accepted all these opportunities and am very happy I'll get to work with Jimbo, Country and Scotty again next year. The 3-month gig should be a lot of fun. We're helping build a SOFEA-based architecture that leverages appropriate client technologies (to be determined) to build a kick-ass web application. I look forward to talking about the technologies we use and things we learn along the way.

So the good news is I've entered The Golden Period. The Golden Period is when you don't have a job, but you do have a start date. Unemployment is absolutely blissful during this time. The Golden Period exists a couple times for me over the next 6 weeks.

I'll be traveling to Costa Rica tomorrow for a best friend's wedding. I'm leaving both my laptop and my iPhone at home. Next week, I'll be loving life with my parents in Costa Rica and Panama. The following week, I'll be working on AppFuse all week and hope to make great progress on developing 2.1. Then I have the 1-week Web Framework Analysis gig, followed by 2 weeks of vacation in Oregon. My Golden Period begins this afternoon (for 3 weeks) and happens again over Christmas (for 2 weeks).

Yeah, life is good. Damn good.

Jack's Mohawk

Last weekend, we celebrated Abbie's birthday with friends and family at Julie's house. My parents and I had a great time, but left a bit early so I could take them to their first DU Hockey game. Towards the end of the game, I received the following text message from Jack's soon-to-be Uncle Jason.

Jack wants a mohawk? Is that OK?

My response:

Absolutely! Please take pictures.

Below are pictures from what ensued shortly after.

Jack looks pretty darn cute with his new haircut and he's received nothing but compliments from everyone. Personally, I dig it.

LinkedIn Cuts 10% (a.k.a. The Journey is Over)

This morning, my co-workers and I discovered that LinkedIn decided to trim 10% of its employees. The Denver Office was among those that were laid off. I can't say we didn't see the writing on the wall. In fact, on the evening of October 15, I sent the following e-mail to my co-workers:

LinkedIn's top investor[1] is Sequoia Capital and they recently posted this presentation on the web.

http://www.slideshare.net/eldon/sequoia-capital-on-startups-and-the-economic-downturn-presentation?type=powerpoint

Notice the reduce head count recommendations. ... Oh well, life goes on.

Raible

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=investors

So, as of today, there is no LinkedIn Denver office. While I had a lot of fun being a UI Architect and managing Engineers, I'm somewhat happy this has happened. After all, now I get to enjoy the best perk about being an employee: the good ol' severance package!

If you're looking for good Engineers, I highly recommend all of the guys who worked for me during this journey. You can read more about the skills they possess and what they're looking for by viewing their LinkedIn Profiles:

Scott Nicholls

Bryan Noll

James Goodwill

As for me, I'm definitely in the market as well. You can view My LinkedIn Profile to see if I might be a good fit for your organization. I'm willing to travel up to 25%, but would prefer not to. After all, ski season is right around the corner.

Lastly, I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed working at LinkedIn. I've never worked with a smarter group of Engineers, nor been so excited about a company's product and vision. I know that LinkedIn will be highly successful and I hope to use their site to find gigs for many years to come.

Happy Birthday Abbie!

Today marks the 6th anniversary of Abbie's birthday. Happy Birthday kiddo!

To see how Abbie has grown up over the years, see past Happy Birthday posts: #1, #3 and #4, #5. To celebrate, I'll be getting off early and having lunch with Abbie's class at school. After that, we'll be embarking on a Daddy/Daughter day where she gets to pick everything we do. I did this with Jack on his birthday and had a lot of fun.

Moving from Spring's XML to Annotations in AppFuse

Last night, I did a spike on AppFuse to change XML to Spring annotations (@Repository, @Service and @Autowired) in its service and data modules. While I was able to accomplish everything in a few hours (including converting tests), I did run into a couple issues.

AbstractTransactionalJUnit4..Tests vs. AbstractTransactionalDataSource..Tests
I've switched from my favorite Spring class to the annotation-happy AbstractTransactionalJUnit4SpringContextTests. However, this has presented an issue: when using ATDSSCT, I was able to call endTransaction() and startNewTransaction(). With ATJ4SCT, this doesn't seem possible. Below is a screenshot of the diff on a test method in the JPA implementation of UserDaoTest:

On the right, you'll notice that I had to comment out @ExpectedException to get the test to pass. This concerns me since this exception should be thrown. Is there a way to call endTransaction() and startNewTransaction() when subclassing AbstractTransactionalJUnit4SpringContextTests?

Instantiating GenericDao Implementations Programmatically
The second feature I tried to add is the ability to instantiate a GenericDao programatically rather than requiring a XML bean definition. In current versions of AppFuse, you can use the following bean definition to create a GenericDao for a model object.

<bean id="personDao" class="org.appfuse.dao.hibernate.GenericDaoHibernate">
    <constructor-arg value="org.appfuse.tutorial.model.Person"/> 
    <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory"/>
</bean> 

When moving to a no-XML required architecture, it'd be nice to allow users to create GenericDao's programmatically. Below is the easiest way I've found to do this in a test:

GenericDao<User, Long> genericDao;
@Autowired
SessionFactory sessionFactory;

@Before
public void setUp() {
    genericDao = new GenericDaoHibernate<User, Long>(User.class);
    genericDao.setSessionFactory(sessionFactory);
}

However, there's a couple problems with this. First of all, mixing constructor injection and setter injection probably isn't a good idea. Changing the constructor to take a SessionFactory solves this problem, but now all subclasses need to have a more verbose constructor:

@Autowired
public UserDaoHibernate(SessionFactory sessionFactory) {
    super(User.class, sessionFactory);
}

Whereas before they had:

public UserDaoHibernate() {
    super(User.class);
}

In an ideal world, I could call new GenericDaoHibernate<User, Long>(User.class) and the SessionFactory would be wired in auto-magically. Is this possible with Spring 2.5?

The 2nd problem this presents is your client code will now be dependent on an implementation rather than the interface. I don't know how to solve that one, but I'd love to figure out a way to create GenericDaos with no XML and no implementation details in the client. Any ideas are most welcome.

If you'd like to see all the changes I made in converting from XML to Annotations, please see this patch.