Last night I returned from a three day Scrum Master training course led by Mishkin Berteig, one of only two certified trainers in Canada. I found it interesting that my employer's existing non-formal development processes will make it MUCH easier to implement Scrum than everyone else who attended the course. Much of what we do already can be refined and made consistent to become Agile and the Scrum way. For example, releasing changes to customers every few weeks. The companies my colleagues work for have hierarchies of sign-offs, waterfall like processes, and way more paperwork than I ever thought possible.

I also found it interesting to contrast the kinds of questions I asked (from a developer's point of view) with the questions asked by the project managers. My questions were more about how to make Scrum work with our tools such as JIRA (with Green Hopper plugin) and Confluence, and how to build a truly cross-functional team that has all the skills necessary to implement any product backlog item from start to finish. I was really surprised to find out that many of the companies my colleagues work for do not use issue tracking systems, or know what Subversion does!

My next plan is to create wiki pages that talk about how to implement Scrum in our company using as few words possible. I think it's important to make it short and readable. I've written several process documents for our company before, usually over 50 pages, and I find that people don't read the whole thing or remember what they read.

I've been doing a lot of reading in mailing lists, blogs, and websites in general. Every once and a while I read about someone who's job description is "software architect". These are the guys who design the specifications used by everyone such as the Java Server Faces spec, JDBC spec, Java Connector Architecture spec, XML Schema spec, and even sophisticated messaging specs between systems that are so well designed that they do not change for several years.

After my recent work creating a connector using the Java Connector Architecture, I am humbled by the brilliance of the software architects who created the specification. Before using JCA, I had written two implementations that had a lot of the same ideas but were not as sophisticated and reusable.

I had planned on studying for the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect exam in 2007, and feel confident that I would be capable of getting it... but now I don't think that I would be happy calling myself a software architect even with a SCEA certificate. All of the architects that I admire are in their 40's and 50's. They have been working in the industry for decades and are in a whole other league. I think what I really need is more experience. I'm still quite young (24 years old) and have decades of software development ahead. I've only ever worked at one company, where almost every project is a one man project.

A couple of weeks ago I got an idea for a project to work on at home (yes an other one) that will form the foundation for two other project ideas that never got off the ground. Once I finish setting up my network the way I want (hopefully another month or so) then I will get started. This will give me even more experience in many areas of Java programming, design and documentation. If I get it to a usable point I'll likely create an open source project site for it on www.java.net.

I started studying in September, spent over 30 hours doing practice exams until I was consistently getting over 90% scores, then took the test. I was quite surprised at how the test seemed harder than the practice exams I purcahsed from Sun. I had 3 different 70 question exams to practice over an over. It's possible that I started memorizing answers after doing each one several times but I can't possibly remember the answer to all 210 questions. My final score was lower than what I had hoped for, but I'm still happy that I passed it. This opens me up to several certification paths.

So what's the plan for 2007? Lets start in Dec 2006.

Dec 2006 Read as much of my Java Connector Architecture book necessary to write a JCA resource adapter for a system at work. JCA resource adapters are the standard way to integrate with an enterprise information system in J2EE. I have the interface written, but it is not wrapped in the standard JCA way. This may spill into January
Jan 2007 Start reading my book on object oriented analysis and design, and the unified process. This book will teach me formal procedures for requirements analysis and documentation, and the entire planning phase of a new system. No more spending a few hours or days partially planning then diving into the code.
Mid-late Feb 2007 Read my J2ME book for developing mobile applications (cell phones and PDAs). This is more of a fun thing, but it's possible I'll be using this knowledge at work in 2007. I don't expect to master it, just touch on it so when I come back to it a second time I have some clue on what to do. I'll be using NetBeans' mobility pack.
Mid-late March 2007 Read a rather short book on the Sun Certified Java Developer exam and aim to start the SCJD certification process by May.
May 2007 An updated version of the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect exam will be out, or at least a book on the new version. Once I'm done with SCJD, get this book and start studying. I will likely be ready for the exam by the end of August. This exam overlaps other books I've read and put into practice already such as EJB 3.0, and the OOA/D/UML book.
Sep 2007 Buy myself a Sun Ultra 20 workstation with Solaris 10 (UNIX). Read through the Sun Certified Solaris Administrator book. This time I don't really need the certification, but it's one of few books out there for Solaris 10. From my SCJP experience, the study guides are much more thorough than the usual books. (800 pages vs maybe 400-600 pages). If I'm capable enough, I'll take the exam before Christmas. Taking this exam is not a priority.

It's an agressive plan. These are the goals I've set for myself to become the Java guru I want to be. If I accomplish everything I set out to do then I will have had 2 full years of full time enterprise java experience, will have several certificates from Sun, and Solaris experience. This will pave the way for an awesome 2008. In 2008 I can focus all of my efforts on programming projects at home -- the things I've been wanting to write for years.

Tonight I did the same practice exam a second time after studying my mistakes from my last attempt. This time I got 81% but I am still quite dissapointed. I wrote down all of my mistakes and noticed that 7 of them were "stupid mistakes" from not paying full attention to detail. If I was paying more attention I could have gotten 91%! That's a huge improvement over my original attempt that scored 74%.

I'll study my notes tomorrow and the day after I'll try out the second practice exam. I suspect it will be harder than the first. I'll study my mistakes from it, do it again, then study my mistakes before the end of the week. I'll move onto the third practice exam doing the same for the week, then I'll be ready for the real test. This is exciting! It just sucks doing a 2.5 hour exam twice a week for 3 weeks, then having to do it again for the real test. Now I'm back to having a goal of 90% or better.

Today NetBeans 5.5 final version was released. This version gives you Java 1.5, EJB 3.0, enterprise pack, visual web pack, and a number of other enhancements. What's really exciting is that Visual Web Pack was released today as a Technical Preview. It hasn't been available for download until today. It is the visual web features of Sun Creator Studio turned into a NetBeans addon. Sun Creator Studio is a really neat web-tier visual JSF design tool built on top of NetBeans 4. By moving it into Visual Web Pack you get to use the same features but in the NetBeans 5.5 (java 1.5, ejb 3.0, etc) and you now have one IDE for everything. With 5.5 Sun has also moved the enterprise features from their Sun Enterprise Studio into a NetBeans addon. This gives you BPEL, visual XML schema designer, UML tools, and a couple more things. I really love this -- everything in a single IDE now.

Recently I purchased the SCJP practice exam from Sun. I get 180 days of unlimited usage. Tonight I tried it for the first time and got 74%. I'm dissapointed but this is the first time out of many many practice exams I'll do before the real one in a few weeks. This is encouraging to me because it means I would have passed. There are three practice exams you get to work with. If you do the same exam multiple times, it's always the same questions. I completed the first one. I wonder if they get progressively harder?