Time flies when you're heads down coding.

The point of this post is to "remember to make time for yourself". I remember reading 7Habits a long time ago, and I don't remember much about it at all - except this: Figure out where you want to go in life, and analyze if each action you take is bringing you closer or away from that goal. This principle can impact every little aspect of your life. From how long you decide to work for your current employer, to what you spend your time looking at while surfing at work. There are a ton of platitudes that come to mind "Aim for nothing, you'll hit it every time" blah blah, but they do all ring true - although they all leave that saccharin aftertaste.

Whenever you're head's down in a project, take time to reflect back about what you've learned, how you've grown, and what you want to learn from the experience. Don't let it be a waste of time for you. Just this instant my coding isn't exciting, so trying to integrate my development into myEclipse. I guess I'm the last person in java-land to start using it, hence the subtitle to this blog. It's a little thing I am doing while grinding out the mundane code that keeps me moving in the right direction.

The Consequences can be Fatal
Back in October, I lost a friend to burnout. He's ok, but he got himself fired. He had a lot of things going on in his life (family health), and he went dark here at work. From my perspective he could have handled it all better - but this comes from someone who wasn't in the situation at all. I tried to help him right the boat a few times, but his heart just wasn't in it. I still think we could have saved him, but others saw fit to let him go.

I have another friend of mine who is going through a divorce, and he is always out loud reminding himself "I've got to get a move-on!". It's been powerful to hear - it keeps me thinking about what I need to be doing.

So, what have I been doing? I have had several work projects going on. I've written an XML interface to Maryland Hospital Association to send CMS quality initiative data. If hospitals participate in a current quality initiative program that CMS is running, and they score well against the criteria, they can receive an additional 2% reimbursement. This is a huge stack of cheese for hospitals, especially since they typically lose money on Medicare patients. That qi link is to Premier. Earlier in the year I created an interface to their site for the same program.

[rant]
In both of these interface development efforts, we were unable to have either Premier or MHA develop proper interface endpoints for our software. In both cases I was left to write HTTP browsing clients to navigate their web sites and initiate a file upload. So, the reliability of these interfaces is impacted by the very structure of their web sites.
[/rant]

[rave]
Thank God there was HttpClient out in the opensource community. Implementing that rant above took just a few hours because someone released a solid, well documented library. Yay Jakarta Commons!
[/rave]

I've also been working toward replacing our internally written ADT code with an interface engine. We are looking at Rhapsody. We had a WebEx session with them, and I was quite impressed. The interface is very intuitive, and I expect if we purchase it, it won't be long until we are live in production. That is my hope anyway.

Not only will this replace code that we've had to maintain, but it will open up other opportunitites (such as web services) so that we can uncouple our ADT from our main JVM. We're going to create an inbound Orders interface as a test project for the engine integration. Hopefully I will have schedule to do web services as well.