New Project

I started a new project last week and I'm really enjoying it. The unbelievable part is that the application is for the iPhone, which is basically a dream come true for me, however thus far I've only been working on the backend.

Not that I'm complaining, as a developer it is a wonderful feeling building something from scratch. In this case I'm creating REST Web Services using Java, and of course I'm using the sexy tools like Maven, Spring, and Hibernate (well they were sexy five years ago, by now they're pretty much just standards). We're embracing the "cloud" by deploying on Amazon's EC2 platform, which makes a lot of sense for any small to medium sized tech project.

On the advice of a friend I downloaded the Google App Engine and played around with it for a couple of hours and I was really impressed with how quickly I could get an app working in a short period of time. I have very little experience with dynamic languages and Python felt a little odd to me, but it didn't take long to appreciate how easy it makes many programming tasks.

Building a well designed Java application takes some time, even for someone like me who has done it many times. I'm wondering how long it would have taken to get something similar going with App Engine and if the end result would have been any better or worse.

It's hard to say, but someday I hope to give it a shot just to have the comparable experience. Doing something you've done before is nice because you know how to get the boring stuff done quickly and how to avoid the gotchas, plus it makes hitting deadlines far less stressful, but doing something new can also be rewarding because it's challenging. I didn't choose a tech career because I'm afraid of doing new things.