Lot’s been goin’ on…
.. and I haven’t exercised since my last entry. 
The week of the last Monday in April I spent in a suburb of Seattle, WA at a 5-day Java development training class. Excellent content, though the instructor was a little weird. Dude looked like a cross between Penn Jillette and Fred Thompson. 
His politics were just touch to the right of Rush Limbaugh, too, and he insisted on being right about everything, whether it was related to the course material or not. Still, I learned a lot, and from having read half-a-dozen java BOOKS, I have to say, wack-job instructor or not, there’s value in instructor-led learning.
Anyway, here’s how this happened: The project manager for my team came to me (the only real “programmer” in the group) and said, “Willy, it seems like we need to hire a Java dev. Is that right?” and I said, “Well, this is the VA. You could spend 6 months making a hire, or you could send me away for a week.” My logic won the day, and when we tried to book the training locally, the company told us it was canceled, but that they would pay travel and lodging for me to go to Seattle. Done deal.
So, now I’m a Java developer. I spent all of last week working on a java project (an annotation tool for comparing original text to machine-processed text) so that I could make sure I “had it”. Now I’m sure I “have it”, and I’m demo-ing last week’s work to some collaborators in Indiana tomorrow.
Next week I’ll be in Washinton D.C. at the Web Maniacs conference learning about the latest and greatest ColdFusion stuff, as well as Adobe Flex and AIR. Exciting stuff that frankly rivals Java and .NET and all the others for integrated Desktop and Internet experiences. We’ll see if it’s useful for the job right away or not.
An interesting note: The best deal on a hotel within walking distance of the conference was the Hotel Helix. Check it out. It’s like a 60’s-hipster themed hotel. I just needed a place to lay my head at night, and instead I’ll be staying here. Crazy. More later.
/w
May 15th, 2008 at 7:44 am
After some prodding, my employer recently decided it was a good idea for me to go to some training, as well. With a new CEO on deck for us, I’m taking advantage while I can!
Good luck in D.C. You’re going in an election year, so there is even more nothing going on than usual.