Strictly Hamburger Coding

I ended up with a sort of special bonus afternoon today as Cat is off in town, and Zach is over his friends house. The basic idea was to make up for a very interrupted week of work and try to get some long-neglected work out of the way.
Mostly, it worked quite well. I got caught up on a couple things that had been nagging, and that’s good. But what really got me grooving was working on… well, a project that a couple folks know about, but I’m not -quite- ready to release to the public. I’ve been referring to it simply as the “Secret Squirrel” app, or just ‘The Squirrel’ for short.
What’s been good about this has been the basicness of the design and implementation. I’ve been spending SO much time delving into the deep complexities of EJB3, JBoss, Hibernate, and more recently Terracotta, I don’t get much of a chance to just sit down and whack out simple code.
Today had 2-3 hours of basic grunt ‘hamburger’ coding, to borrow a phrase from MASH. No fancy libraries, environments, or oddities. Well, okay, one new library that handles OpenGL rendering, but everything else was basic data application coding and design.
It felt good! It sort of underlined where I’ve gotten with Java programming over the last 2 years or so, and now basic coding is second nature. Eclipse has become my environment of comfort, whether it’s running on Windows or Linux (in fact I’m leaning toward moving back to Linux full time soon – with both machines up and running cleanly on my desk, I find myself doing more on the Linux box than on Windows… but I digress…) , and the Java OOP approach to program development Just Plain Makes Sense. It’s nice.
Tomorrow it’ll be back to EJB3 and Terracotta land, and all the mysteries therein, but for now, I can look at what I did today and do a “That felt good!” happy dance.
And the code even worked.