After ten years of working in a Microsoft environment, in an environment of get-it-done-fast, I have decided to fulfill my lifelong passion and really get stuck into the open source community. This blog is the story of my conversion.
One of my traits is being somewhat of an academic, or as my father says, "too much brains and not enough common sense". As such I have always admired what Google has done and is doing for the programming environment. They provide a set of resources which are second to none, and their openness and the promotion of the openness philosophy means that everyone benefits from the cumulative innovation.
After working in the "get it done and get it done fast" arena I decided enough was enough and after finishing my last Microsoft contract decided that it was time to go back to the drawing board and learn to do things the open source way.
I started in January 2010 with a then Sun, now Oracle, Sun Certified Programming course, and have been picking up GWT along the way. It has been an interesting time as I fall back to bad habits of quick-spaghetti-procedural programming, but I am slowly coming around to the majesty, and the reason behind OO technology.
I had always worked with Google stuff, and after Google App Engine came out in 2007 I realised this was going to be a game changer and I built a scheduling application in Google App Engine-Python called www.sohoappspot.com. After discovering GWT I realised that this needed to be ported to that technology.
To get up to speed I booked myself a ticket to Google IO 2010 which I throughly enjoyed and found very useful. After that I have been learning about the various frameworks surrounding GWT. This has now taken me on another journey involving Dependency Injection with Guice and GIN, a full MVP Framework using GWTP, and a new methodology of programming which sometimes I find counter intuitive but which I realise that has more to do with my understanding than the technologies involved.
For the past few years I have been building great Enterprise level GWT applications leveraging the best techniques and frameworks. At present I work for a great startup based in Boston - called Apptegic. We are aiming to revolutionize marketing and customer usage analytics. And build a great GWT application along the way.
Thanks
Gene Conroy-Jones
