seminole

We have a well established product in the form of a standalone app that clients run in their environments. Technically it's a dropwizard app with H2 for persistence (our aim was to make it simple to manage). We now have clients asking to make it highly available. That will have to work in varied environments, with storage likely being in aws/gcc/azure. We have a fair amount of work cut out for us to move all the state we currently have on the filesystem to DB storage. But I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions or comments about things to pay attention to, or tools to use when moving to HA?

Hi all,

this is admittedly very broad and open-ended question, but I'd like to hear your opinions or related experiences.

I joined this company about a half a year ago. It's about 10 years old and has < 100 employees. About 10 of those are developers. The level of technical skill varies, but is low overall. The most tenured dev has been here for <3 years, majority for less than a year. Most of our job is on external and internal websites, as well as supporting services. The state of the software is between bad and horrendous. Stack is Java 6, JSF 1, Spring 3, Hibernate 3, Mysql 5, Tomcat 7, SVN. Most of the code is in the 'core' module, with all sorts of mess (plain SQL, manual rollbacks for remote services, hundreds of Spring contexts etc). Code coverage is low. Domain is not that complex. The websites are not very interactive (not now, at least) - mostly form submission. We have an OK API, but it would need to be extended to allow external website to rely on it. We've been given a week to step back and think about we can do about all of this. The output of this should be proposals that we can sell to business (with substantial budget allocated for next year).

So, finally, my question: what would you focus on, both short and long term?

In the long term, I'd like to change the dev culture around here. I think we got here because a) we're averse to change, and b) we don't help/allow people to get better at their stuff. However, I'm not sure how to approach it. Any suggestions?

What about the tech stack? JSF 1 is awful, RichFaces3 is falling apart on the new browsers. Upgrading to JSF 2 is no trivial task. Is it worth it? Should we move to another stack altogether?

Any related comments are much appreciated. Thank you!

P.S. No, we can't just throw everything away (not the least because the team is not competent enough to churn out lots of good code, fast).

AskHN is a one-to-many conversation. It's difficult enough to keep a conversation going across the pond due to timezones. The thread is only going to be visible for a day, and I'd like to be able to reply to the people who offered their opinions.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to ask for your comments. I'll try to keep this as short as I can.

I'm a 26yo enterprise Java dev and the sole provider for my little family (wife and toddler). We're EU citizens. We spent the last 8 years in UK, and have recently moved to Belgium looking for a change. And change we got, but not the good kind. So want to move again. My wife keeps saying we should move to US, perhaps California. She thinks we'll finally have some sunshine, lots of affordable fresh food, perhaps live in a house with garden, beautiful nature close enough to actually go camping for the weekends, and friendly and approachable people. And she's probably right about these, but I'm a little scared about what we'd be giving up. Namely,

40h workweek 5 weeks of holiday a year free/cheap health insurance free/cheap education up to university level for our daughter.

Am I being paranoid? I hear stories from both ends of the spectrum. Some say they've been working 60h/week with no holiday for 5 years, in which case all that sunshine and nature have as much value as a travel brochure. But others claim that US is developer's paradise. And while health insurance is expensive, some get it from their companies or it's offset by the substantially higher salary. Some claim that public education system is also underrated.

What's your opinion/experience with this? What would you expect re: work/life balance & health insurance in a decent (choose your own definition) company? Any comments on school education? General cost of living?

Also, I do realize US is huge, but California is the only state I get to hear about - please give a shout for your favorite place!

Thanks a lot for comments, they are important to us.