Packed

It's very unlikely of me to skip a week day before updating my blog. Apologies. Damn busy. In fact, now that I'm transitioning to my new role, I'm more busy than ever.

In my new role, where I work mainly from home (officially next week), in order for me to work effectively, there are numerous conference calls that I need to get on. The new project that I'm starting is yet another mouth watering one, coupled with a lot of headaches. No, no sexy women yet.. but it's yet another core system replacement.. insurance.

So, next week, I fly off to Brazil to check out this insurance vendor which my new company has invested in and which has now made this Brazilian software a "political choice". The problems? This vendor has a proven .NET solution, however, rolling out to the larger countries, my newco's directions are J2EE. So I'm going there to not only check out functionality, but to suss out the new version which they have started re-architecting on J2EE. Already I can see some bizarre decisions... mixture of session and entity beans (i hate entity beans), a custom built rule engine (how robust is that?), lacks some critical functional components like undo/redo, statementing..

My god.. it feels like a custom built job!