I had plenty of time this night to migrate my Dev @ Work blog to my new server. This new server is faster, better, bigger and more reliable than the old server. The migration went very smooth. At the moment the DNS records are being adjusted to point to the new server, which might take a while. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.
Today I finally found the time to finish and post my testimony. In this testimony I try to give you an idea about what my motivation are and where I get my energy from. I hope you will read, it will give you an deep insight into who I am and what my believes are.
You can click here to navigate to the testimony page or use the sidebar on the right of this post.
Furthermore I want to encourage you to write your own personal testimony, because thinking about your motivations and believes will strengthen you by giving you an clearer insight into who you are.
I use RSS Bandit [1] every single day so I thought it would be appropriate to put the application in the spotlight. First of all let me explain what RSS is. Nah I am not going to do it myself, we have got the Wikipedia for that, donâ??t we?
RSS (which, in its latest format, stands for “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or pod casts. A RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favourite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually. [2]
RSS Bandit is an open-source RSS aggregator; you can add feeds to it and it will automatically check if there are new items on that feed and notifies you when there are. The application saves tour time because you donâ??t have to check the websites manually. I love RSS Bandit because it is so incredible easy to use; it is (one of) the first program I start in the morning and (one of) the last program that I close.
| [1] | Official RSS Bandit Website |
| [2] | Wikipedia – RSS |
That is most certainly true; my last post was about a week ago. I have been very busy, both professionally and personally. However, today I have time to write for my blog and for some projects I have been working on.
Professionally I have been very busy with re-implementing an application to leverage to power of DDD (Domain Driven Design). The application contains objects, users and permissions, the difficult part was to come up with a design to handle permissions for the different objects. At the moment the architecture is highly experimental, but when I am finished with it I will publish a sample on this weblog, so keep an eye out.
Personally I have been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend, since she is going on a 2 week holiday this weekend. This weekend I went with her, her sister and her friend on a weekend trip in Venlo. We had some great time there; I wish that could last forever. Unfortunately all good things end. Anyway, my journey to find 5 minutes beauty each day is going absolutely amazing: It gives me great joy and happiness in my life.
Today I am going to work on a very interesting new concept we came up with in a meeting last week. It is an effort to present the truth about a lot of things in a simple, yet comprehensible, way. We want to provoke discussions on various subjects, like: the ‘Al Gore’ discussions about the environment. I do not know where it will lead, how we are going to do it, but I am very existed about it and I believe that it is an opportunity to change the world. I will keep you posted on this!
First of all let make it clear that I do not have a real split personality, I just use the term â??Split Personalityâ?? figuratively to differentiate between the two types of writing I do.
I have decided to split this blog into two sections. One section about my personal life and one section about software development. To clearly differentiate between those two sections I decided to split my personality as well. For my personal posts I will keep using the my real name â??Bert Willemsâ?? and for my software development related posts I am going to use my â??hackerâ?? alias â??Trilobyte.â??
You can find a list of posts written by my two selves by clicking on the links behind the names below.
| Bert Willems | http://www.devatwork.nl/index.php/author/admin/ |
| Trilobyte | http://www.devatwork.nl/index.php/author/trilobyte/ |
I hope you like what I have done, otherwise please let me know!
I have spend most of this day to improve my weblog with some new features. The most obvious changes can be found in the sidebar just right of this post. I changed the whole sidebar layout and introduced some new items.
Another imported change is that most of the pages are translated in English and I made some minor content updates.
Last, but certainly not least, I added printing support to the post. Click on a post and you will see a small icon of a printer just below the title. I think that will be a welcome feature.
Tonight I will try to finish the translation my curriculum vitae.
As of today my weblog supports cell phones with WAP support, here is the URL http://www.devatwork.nl/wp-wap.php.
I have been blogging about this subject for about a week now, but this time I will elaborate on it in great detail. I hope you enjoy reading this post and get interested in it too.
Recently it occurred to me that I, and in my humble opinion most people, focus on the negative side of life. For example: switch on your television and watch the 8 ‘o clock news. Most of the time you will see negative items like: war, suicide bombings, pain and suffering, tax raises, child molestations and the list goes on and on. If I had to judge the world solely based on what I see on the TV, I would not want to live in it.
Then it struck me: Why should I let all that negativity dictate my life? Why not focus on the positive side? I am not suggesting that we should ignore all those negative things and pretend they do not happen, not at all, they are a part of this world. But at that moment I decided to spend at least 5 minutes of my time each day just looking at or experiencing something beautiful in this world. I do not plan that moment or anything; I just open my mind to it. I am confident that there is enough of that beauty in this world to fill those 5 minutes each day.
That ‘something beautiful’ can really be anything in this world, ranging from something physical to something purely emotional. Here is a very, very incomplete list:
For example: Yesterday I was at my girlfriends house and we were just lying next to each other, that is when I gazed into her eyes and I felt, for the first time I can remember, truly happy, like nothing else mattered. Or today when I was cycling to an early meeting: I first saw a heron and just a few moments later a deer crossing the bicycle path. Those moments make this life worth living.
Anyway, since I started taking the time to enjoy those moments, my life has improved significantly. I can do so much more in a day; I sometimes fail to see how I could ever have lived without it.
That is it for now, I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading this and I hope it works for you too when you decide to give it a try yourself. Questions, critics and comments are, as always, very much appreciated. Thank you for you time and goodbye, Bert
First of my apologies, I know I said that yesterday I would write a page where you can find information about the projects I am currently working on, but I did not manage to get it done, it was too late yesterday. However today I did write the page, you can find the result in the menu on the right ‘Current Projects’. Hopefully that will give you an insight in my work. The information is by far not complete, but I promise I will update it a.s.a.p..
Yesterday I brainstormed about a security architecture for the van der Werff Database project, I came up with a pretty simple architecture, it based on the aggregates in Domain Driven Design. I still need to spike if the architecture actually works, but I am confident that it will. When I finish the spike I will post the architecture here.
I am not going to do much work today, because I want to spend time with my girlfriend. I am not sure what we are going to today, because the weather is bit strange here in Holland. Anyway, we will find something.
That is it for now, the next time I will probably tell you about the daily 5 minutes of beauty, my quest to find a beautiful thing everyday (can be anything) and just enjoy it for 5 minutes.
Today was a very though day, and itâ??s not even over yet: It started this morning: It was 06:30 and I had slept for about 5 hours before my alarm rang, I almost threw my cell phone out the window, luckily for the darn thing, and the closed window, I could control myself. Anyway, in the next hours until hours I enjoyed myself with writing unit tests for the project I am currently working on.
After a short lunch I went straight back to writing unit tests until it was 5 oâ??clock. I managed to write about 1500 lines of test code, which is, in my opinion, pretty descent for a days work. I gained some more insight in how you can write queries for NHibernate, which will be useful in the near future, as in tomorrow probably.
I spend much of this evening making changes to project documents for another project (yes, I should make a page with the projects I am currently working on, tomorrow, I promise), that was a bit annoying because I did not feel like it, however I committed myself to do it anyway. The reason that I did not feel like it is that I received a lot of bad news in a half our, but I managed to get it done.
Now I am doing some work on my blog, I decided to use English as the one and only language. I started with the translation of the pages and everything else, but I give up for today. The only thing that I am going to do today is read a book, socialize with my (girl)friend(s) and try to go to bed early, did I say one thing??? Anyway, that is it for now. Bye and make sure to check out my blog tomorrow.
