Daddy can pix it!

In my house, shared with my lovely wife and two kids, there is a believe amongst the smaller members of the family, that I can fix anything. If something is broken it is delivered sometimes with great ceremony into Daddy's oppice (office) to be pixed (fixed).

Now I would love to claim myself some DIY guru with special powers to mend or repair, or even better to make or invent.

Sadly in the "real" world I am a simple fella who can do basic tasks and who has a tube (currently missing in action) of Super Glue that can be used to mend and repair many a tragic accident.

Ok, so where am I going with this. Outside of my family life I am for want of a better description a software engineer. I have worked developing software at various levels of the software stack for over 20 years now. I believe I am a pretty decent software engineer and have worked for big firms, small firms and in recent years I have run my own company with a couple of friends and ex-colleagues.

Increasingly as I go through my working life I am amazed at the progress we make in terms of the software and tools that are available to us, and often at the same time appalled by just how difficult is it to get technologies working outside of a simple use case that the developer had in mind when writing it, and worse still just how difficult it can be to make differernt tools, libraries and products work together.

So I increasing spend time trying to discover and integrate new and existing technologies to produce ways of increasing productivity and making the building of effective solutions that will scale and be resilient.

The goal of this blog to try and provide a place to bring together the successful (and failed) attempts I have at technology intergration in the hope that it will

• be useful to others attempting to follow a similar path
• be a reminder to myself if no one else as to what I did and why and what tips and tricks I learned
• give me a place to appraise the technologies I find and maybe generate some debate with others about where the technologies might go

As I write this I find myself wondering if anyone but I will ever read it, and whether it matters. But I can but try and embrace the 21st century.

In the coming days and weeks I hope to blog on some of the technologies I am currently working with such as

• The Old - Spring, XStream, Java, Hibernate
  
• The New - Google App Engine for Java
• The Borrowed - GigaSpaces and Caching, GWT, GXT
  
• The Blue - Eclipse Tooling

I hope to provide some software super glue enabling others to quickly link, integrate, fix and reuse some of the great software out there in the world.

Ok, enough already, on with the show!