Series Reflections: Growing up

About this series: From time to time I'll take a look at blog posts from my archives and reflect on my views and opinions from back then.

In one of my first blog posts a little over 3 years ago, I wrote about Java's Dynamic Proxies. The post isn't very long, but it came with an example application of how to use Dynamic Proxies. It's a simple logger, which logs all calls to method invocations.

Looking at the example almost 3 years later and I don't know how many million LOC wiser, I'm immediately thinking of the Spring Framework. It uses Dynamic Proxies heavily in their basic AOP implementation. At that time I had only heard of Spring, but definitely not of AOP. I didn't know that logging would be the poster child example of AOP today. It's quite pleasing to see that I had good ideas back than.

Looking at my code, though, I can clearly see that I haven't changed that much over time. Sure, it's just an example, something I pushed out quick and dirty, yet I can still see similarities to my code today. Steve Yegge thinks that "a decade of experience makes you a teenager" in software development, well I guess he's right. Maybe I need some more time to mature. Although I think you shouldn't solely rely on year's of experience when judging a software developer.

Looking back at that blog post and the enclosing example, I think I gained a lot more experience over the years. The implementation of my knowledge though, judging it based on the Dynamic Proxies example, is basically still as solid as it used to be.