http://ted.pennin.gs

Engaged!

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:04:41 GMT

I proposed to my girlfriend Aubrey late last month!

I proposed in the Getty Museum's gardens high atop LA. Below is Aubrey trying on her ring for the first time! (I hired Chris Miller, an awesome LA-area photographer, to take pictures.)

Right afterward, we raced down the 405 to Long Beach and sailed off to Catalina for a couple super relaxing days at the Inn on Mt Ada (aka the Wrigley Mansion).

It was all super great! If we're Facebook or Twitter friends, there are a couple albums to peruse.

So my final 2012 goal is to plan (and save for) an awesome wedding in summer 2013.

2012 Goals

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:00:00 GMT

My 2012 goals are pretty simple. Most of them are focused on professional development. But I genuinely enjoy software engineering, so it's enjoyable to dedicate time to it.

Finish my Master's from BU
I started this degree in January 2010, alongside a full-time job. I'm now three classes away from the degree — Computer Networks, Operating Systems and an elective. I can finish it this year, and I will do so.

My pace (heretofore and forward) probably means abandoning the MA in humanities (art history) for which I attended U Chicago 2007-2008. I am ok with that. I began that degree not knowing what I wanted to do professionally. It helped me see that my interest in the humanities is better served as a hobby than a career. I should write more about my experiences there in another post.

Learn Emacs
I am very interested in Clojure and in Lisps in general, so I think it will help to learn Emacs at some point soon. I learned to code with pico/nano as my editor. I use Eclipse (STS actually) for the most part now. I'm excited to get the best of both approaches with Emacs and Emacs Lisp.

Continue professional development
Separate from finishing the Master's, I'd like to continue learning new languages and better engineering practices. I'd also like to get some leadership experience on projects. In the fall, I'd like to attend Strange Loop and Clojure/conj. Maybe I'll also spend some time learning another language, like Haskell, Erlang, Prolog, IO or Smalltalk; all of those are on the list.

Get in better shape
I need to start being more active. I would love to run a 5k and start training for longer races. Hopefully within the next three years I will be able to run a marathon on Catalina. It's such a beautiful island and a fun idea. I'd love to do it. It's hard to do this in New Hampshire, though, because the weather sucks most of the year.

Spend more time on the NHJUG
I need to spend more time on the NHJUG. We need to redo the website and line up speakers for most of 2012.

And finally a surprise goal!
I will post about it in a couple days. I realize this sounds like a Nixon 1968 campaign plank.

Loving Clojure

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 02:10:03 GMT

I'm learning Clojure and it's super great. I've worked through a most of the Koans and solved a few Project Euler problems.

I was also lucky enough to buy a ticket in time to attend the Conj earlier in the month. That was an incredible conference. So much material and so informative. Wow. It makes me really want to go to Clojure/West in March.

Once I feel a little more comfortable with the language, I think I will dabble in integrating Clojure in Spring applications. I'd like to create DSLs to simplify their coexistence. As an enterprise Java developer, Java and Spring are how I spend my days, but sometimes that comes at the cost of Java's high ceremony. Clojure's expressiveness mixed with Spring magic would be super powerful. Professionally, it's about picking the right tool for the job. I hope this becomes a theme of my blog.

I'd also like to rewrite either this blog or the NHJUG website. But who knows when I'll get around to that. This blog has had many incarnations (PHP, App Engine, the current Spring MVC stack), but that's a whole other blog post.

Spring 3: What's New

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 23:02:57 GMT

Here's that talk I promised to post!

Spring 3: What's New

View more presentations from Ted Pennings.

Forthcoming talk on Spring 3

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:23:46 GMT

Exciting news! I will be giving an hour long talk on the new things in Spring 3 for a grad course I'm taking on enterprise Java. My talk will include an overview of annotation config and the new-style Spring MVC @RequestMapping approach to @Controller configuration, plus much more.

Check back in a couple weeks for my slides!

Spring MVC Talk at NHJUG!

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 01:33:59 GMT

I gave a talk on Spring MVC at the New Hampshire Java Users Group last night -- check it out!

Also, check out NHJUG while you're at it -- I'm a co-founder!

Spring MVC Intro / Gore - Nov NHJUG

View more presentations from Ted Pennings.

IE9 First Impressions: Not As Awful

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 01:32:38 GMT

Over the weekend I played with the IE9 beta on a Windows 2008 server I temporarily setup in Rackspace Cloud. It's not that awful — or at least not as awful as previous versions. It lacks some basic things like native spell check and intuitive tabs. For example, the tabs and address bar reside on the same horizontal line and fight each other for space. You can make the address bar larger (and the tabs smaller) or the opposite, but you cannot place them on separate lines.

Acid3 IE9 scores an impressive 95/100 on the Acid3 test. By contrast, my personal favorite Safari 5 scores 97/100. (In fact, WebKit nightlies have scored 100/100 for two years...) This is good progress, but a bit overdue. Reasonable people expected this in IE8.

HTML5 IE9 scores a disappointing 21/300 at html5test.com. Safari 5 scores 208/300 on the same test... yes, 10x better than IE9. Somehow IE9 actually scores higher in compatibility mode (27/300)! The HTML5 features supported are <canvas>, local storage, session storage, cross-document messaging and SVG.

This is a good start. Let's hope HTML5 is where the IE team focuses the remaining energy before the final release. At this rate, however, web developers may have to wait for IE 10 before they can stop drinking the Microsoft haterade.

Coming soon!

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:33:36 GMT

Check back soon, as I am currently finishing the software that powers this blog.

Once I have that finished, I will write here. Until I get bored.