Monthly Archives: March 2007

Are you smart enough to quit your job?

Thanks to Erik’s Linkblog, I came across one of the best blog posts I have read recently.

Paul Tyma, a senior engineer at Google, talks about Software Engineering interviews. Something he said, really struck a chord with me –

if you are the smartest person at where you work – QUIT

I came across the same idea while reading Paul Graham some time ago. He mentions the talk You and Your Research by Richard Hamming. In Paul Graham’s words, ask yourself these three questions –

  1. What are the most important problems in your field?
  2. Are you working on one of them?
  3. Why not?

These are the questions that can change your life.

I have been thinking about switching to a four day work week, so I can spend at least a couple of days a week working on more challenging and interesting problems. And today, I feel I am ready to make that move.

I see happier times ahead :)

Spring MVC – How to access the command object in referenceData method

One thing that I really like about Spring MVC is that if you need a particular method, and you make a reasonable guess where to look for it, you will find it. That is, in fact, a lot like core Java APIs.

I needed a reference to the current form backing object to set up the reference data for the form being displayed. Now, most of Spring tutorials, books etc. only mention the referenceData(request) method that takes a single HttpServletRequest object as parameter, and that was the only one I knew about. So, I was planning to look up the details of the Spring MVC form workflow, but did the usual googling for anyone else running into this method.

And what do I find? A method that does exactly what I needed :)

If your referenceData method depends on the command object, this is what you use – 

referenceData(PortletRequest request,
Object command, Errors errors)