Amin Abbaspour’s Blog

When I build a system, I try to:

1. Avoid ORM
they cause more trouble than what they solve. for simple cases I recommend pure JDBC and for complex cases i enjoy iBATIS (and recently IBM pureQuery)

2. Use Messaging
messaging is not just using a message broker, it is a mental model for designing messages first and then services (Contract First Design).

3. Insist on functional paradigm
insist in immutability, finalizing, constructor dependency injection and recursion.

4. Use In Memory Database and In Memory Data Grids
Rare systems require IMDG/IMDB solutions. We call such a systems XTP (extreme-transaction processing) systems. In such cases we ought to put data in memory rather on disk. I have used GigaSpaces, and Coherence in the past and now work closely with Infinispan. TimesTen is a another solution that an XTP architecture should have an eye on.

5. Reduce contention
EDA As much as possible.

6. Insist on Testing and Coverage

7. Live in -10/-5 years from Now
I don’t use tools unless they are proved or unless I have no other choice!

8. Java is not the Only one!
I am a Java architect but I recommend and learn other systems built with Python, C, Erlang and Scala as well.

No doubt I am on the busiest days of my life, working on wide range of projects and companies. This much has gathered not necessarily on my own will but from the shrinking society of experienced software engineering in my country, Iran. Everyone (with even two or three years of experience) decides to leave to other countries (esp Canada and Australia) and what is left is tens of dandling projects looking for a lead in any price. This processes has speed up after fake election here in Iran and I do hope that I myself join these fellows soon too.

Sometimes I myself wonder how do can I handle so much work? It became so strange to I myself when I decided to sit down and make this list:

1 – DPI (Data Processing Company of Iran)

I started to tighten my career in DPI after my friend Ara left to US a month ago.

2 – MAGFA (IT Development Center)

My career in MAGFA dates back to six years ago. We build and maintain SMS oriented products. Now we have build a modern engine with strong clustering capabilities. Team members have codenamed this an Palang (meaning leopard in Farsi). Palang handles about 20% of our daily load by now and we have plan to put in under full load in about three months. A lot of work to do, in a great domain including cool staff such as Java, Erlang, OpenMQ and Perlbal.

3 – Raysaz

I help raysaz to run their epayment and eticketing systems. We have huge load for some concerts and although we have strong machines but still there is much space for optimization and tuning. Most of my work is to help development team take correct decisions and tune our stack on top of Linux/Tomcat/Apache.

4 – Teenab

GlusterFS + Amazon S3!

5 – ?

I do X for Y (now find X and Y)!

6 – Navaco

Working as a banking systems consultant (based on my previous experience in Caspian and DPI) for Navaco which is hoping to do core system development for Bank Maskan one day. I also try to help DPI and Navaco move toward a mutual agreement these days. (mission impossible IV)

7 – ONT Soft

Literally I am the lead of support team in ONT soft for the contract we have with NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks) in Iran to support IACC Proxy, MM1 Proxy and L5 balancers. Hopefully they all work well and there is not much work in this field right now.

8 – Community

I keep reading and contributing to projects. I am interesting of reading about modern highly available and high-traffic architectures and paradigm. I sometimes contribute to Iran Java Users Groups mailing list and meeting. I am also very interested in JBoss new IMDG solution (infinispan) and keep following and testing every new release.

I also instruct myself how to be a better agile coach and coordinator in a team. How to remain polite and friendly and yet take the most possible from junior developers and also teach them a whole new things including correct programming paradigms, linux and documentation.

Functional programming has always been my interest and I dedicate sometime to improve my erlang and scala.

9 – Remain responsive for other project

I remain responsive and in touch for the most of the projects and companies I had worked for since most of the have live applications. A list of companies such as: Caspian (for Caspian Bank), Basamad AC&C (OPXi Manager), TeleXis (telecom billing system), and Pars Azarakhsh (Digital Library).

10 – Learn French

We plan to move to Quebec. Hence i should know some french.

Wow.. the list contains at least 5 major works and 5 minor. An this becomes more strange considering that I am not a only-talks consultant but a coder man which manages and coordinates most of the above teams and write down hundreds lines of code each day.

And yet I try to try to remain a (relatively) responsible husband and member of the family. I dedicate time to remain in family ring and visit parents regularly. We also wait for our first son – Ryan – to come within a month

Thanks the Load for all the power and capabilities he’d given to me.

_rabbitmqctl()
{
        local cur prev opts
        COMPREPLY=()
        cur=”${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}”
        prev=”${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}”

        #
        #  The basic options we’ll complete.
        #
        opts=”stop stop_app start_app reset force_reset cluster status rotate_logs add_user delete_user change_password list_users add_vhost delete_vhost list_vhosts map_user_vhost unmap_user_vhost list_user_vhosts list_vhost_users list_queues list_exchanges list_bindings list_connections”

        #
        #  Complete the arguments to some of the basic commands.
        #
        # TBD

        COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W “${opts}” — ${cur}))
        return 0
}

complete -F _rabbitmqctl rabbitmqctl

I feel deep happiness and joy these days…

Our cat – pishoo -  is back to garage, I found my beautiful hand-watch (which I had left in my desk drawer at Caspian), I have found a cool new swimming pool close to our house at Sohrevardi (which I get used to visit regularly 2-3 times a week), I am about to finalize my contract with company.com, we are going to go for holidays to Thailand in two weeks and then probably to Turkey for another business trip, and more over i receive endless love from my darling wife Ghazaleh just like always.

So what else does a man need to feel in heaven?

There are 3 companies which I always looked to work for:

• Google, since knowledge is there; I sent my resume, they implicitly said  “Are you kidding?”
• LShift, since we both love Erlang; again I sent my resume, the said “Come what may!”
• Gigaspaces; I never dared to send a resume; sure they wont hire Iranians anyway.

And then comes this new position (which is not finalized yet but we are in good shape of progress) which seems to out-weight all these three. Now its my turn to say… come what may…