One of my introspective aspects of life as a software engineer is that I always feel like my skills are inadequate, even when there is evidence that they are plenty sufficient. Over the last few days, I feel like I have taken major strides. One is getting set up with Eclipse as my Java IDE. I do not jump lightly into new IDEs, typically choosing to do most of my development with Emacs. Eclipse does have many nice features, including integration with Ant and JUnit as well as having a mode that lets you turn on Emacs key bindings. Yeah!
I also spent part of the last few days getting up to speed with using Log4J in my Java
projects. I hope to never print debugging statements to STDOUT or STDERR again. By setting this up, you can alter the level and destination of the output by changing a few lines in a property file, without ever touching the code. Papa likes!
