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JVM Languages

Developer Diaries

By DDJ Staff, December 13, 2006

From start-ups to global enterprises, developers sometimes face similar problems—and turn to like-minded solutions.

Just Do the Math

Christof Schmalenbach

Employer: IBM Global Business Consulting

Job: IT Architect

DDJ: What's your job at IBM?

CS: IT consulting for insurance companies. My job is the design of application architectures based on the J2EE technology. Especially, I'm very interested in IT areas that happen at the border between development and production. Nonfunctional requirements, such as performance and security, are my focus.

DDJ: What do you like about your job?

CS: I enjoy working with people and teams from very different cultures and countries, and with different backgrounds. To talk with a business representative in the morning, chat with a colleague in India who fixes a bug in one of your system apps in the afternoon, and visit a web-based workshop in the evening where international people come together, is what I like.

DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job?

CS: Every day you can find a new product, a new technology, or a new framework that promises you the solution to your hardest IT problems. Sometimes that is true, often it's not. It is not easy to separate the mayfly from innovations that will still help you in five years.

DDJ: What have you found that makes your job easier?

CS: In my daily work, I often find help in mathematical approaches. For example, memory leaks in J2EE apps belong to the most harmful of problems. Of course, you need very sophisticated tools to identify the root cause of memory leaks. But for a first insight and to quantify the dimension of the heap loss, it is sufficient to gather heap usage every second over a time range of 1-2 hours, then apply the method of least squares in its simple form (linear regression) over the time versus memory series, and you are done.

Surviving in the Amazon Jungle

Justin Mecham

Employer: Gyrofly Inc.

Job: Owner

DDJ: You're an entrepreneur, the owner of your own software company, you've even been profiled in Inc. magazine. What do you do in your job?

JM: As the owner of Gyrofly, which is a software company based in northern Utah, my time is dedicated to the development and support of Associate-O-Matic.

DDJ: Which does what, exactly?

JM: It's a web application that allows website/blog owners to create an Amazon Associate store and add it to their site in a matter of minutes without any programming.

DDJ: What do you like about your job?

JM: It's exciting to be able to take an idea and turn it into something that hundreds or even thousands of website owners can benefit from.

DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job?

JM: Balancing the addition of new features with ease-of-use is one of the greatest challenges I've had developing Associate-O-Matic.

DDJ: What have you found that makes your job easier?

JM: Because Associate-O-Matic integrates tightly with Amazon's Web Services API, I'd say Amazon makes my job easier.

Bashing Bugs and Bad Guys

Dominik Weber

Employer: Guidance Software

Job: R&D Principal Architect

DDJ: What is Guidance Software?

DW: Guidance Software is recognized worldwide as the industry leader in investigative technologies. Its EnCase solutions enable corporate, government, and law enforcement agencies to conduct investigations of all types, respond to eDiscovery requests, and take action in response to external attacks.

DDJ: What's your job there?

DW: As a Principal Architect, I'm involved in the whole lifecycle from the design to the shipping and I act as a technical mentor. Due to this, my activities are varied. For example, recently I wrote Amd64 assembly for copy protection, reversed a file format, debugged the release version with a postmortem crash dump, and designed a multicodepage GREP search engine. Currently, I am designing and implementing a Unicode full-text indexing engine in C++.

DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job?

DW: One thing about my job that is challenging is balancing software robustness with performance and flexibility—as well as writing file parsing code that will not crash when being fed with random data.

DDJ: What have you found that makes your job easier?

DW: I wrote a build tool for our 35+ different versions of software and a debugging tool that lets me set hardware read breakpoints and load/save/compare memory of another process. Visual Studio 2005 with some custom plug-ins and macros also makes my job easier.

DDJ: What do you like about your job?

DW: I enjoy the fact that, due to our software, killers and other criminals are caught and put away.


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