Recovering slowly and preparing Java Tips
Over the last ten (or so) days, just right for Easter, my health status went down again. I cought a small cold, not enough to keep me from working but bad enough so that I spent my non-work time in bed to recover faster. This helped somewhat in the way that it did not get worse anymore and today I'm not really feeling much of that issue anymore.
But this recovering was paid expensive. My spine aces returned, most probably caused by the lying-in-bed and limited exercising because of my injured ankle. Currently it's bad, not as bad as back in 2006, but still enough so that it causes me a constant pain in the lumbar spine. For now I just can fight this with pain killers but I know I need to get back to exercising as fast as possible to strengthen my muscles in this area again and get stabilized. Of course, I have to pay attention to the possible remainings of the cold and that I do nothing which could harm my wounded ankle.
Totally unrelated to this, some time ago I began collecting the different improvements I make to our sourcecode at work. I did this because I recognized, that I often applied the same improvements over and over again to other people's sourcecode and a lot of them are quite similar to each other. Most of this improvable code exists, because people just don't know that similar functionality already exists in common frameworks and so algorithms and operations get reingeneered again and again.
I plan to develop this collection so that each improvement has a before-after-example, a detailled explaination why this improvement is better, maybe a categorization into different areas (eg. Collections, Framework, Java5-Enhancement, etc.) and a difficulty-level. Maybe if this turns out well, I could also organize an internal training-event to spread this knowledge and raise the quality of our code just a tiny bit :)
Nevertheless, I'm also thinking of publishing each tip here in the blog for free availability and open discussion, so stay tuned if you're a Java developer, maybe there's also something in for you.