Reboot Complete

Last I posted here was five years ago when I published My Reboot Manifesto.
Geez, what happened?

I guess it would be fair to sum it up real quick with these words;
WOW! WHAT A RIDE!

I have not regretted for a single second that I took that leap. I learned so much and met so many great people. I've made an impact on so many millions of peoples lives and helped make tons of money to both the company and to charity, and a little bit to myself too. And it totally drowned me in swag! It has sure been the ride of my life!

But it is coming to an end, and with that I thought it would be interesting to revisit the "manifesto". So let me just walk through it bullet by bullet, and please comment if you don't agree so we can talk it out. =)

Working with products for my employer instead of consulting for external clients

Round one is definitely for the better, for me I might add. I really enjoyed working for my own company's good rather than helping others, and with the added benefit of no time reporting it wasn't even a close game.

Using a MacBook Pro with OS X instead of a Dell with Windows

Another win! I generally don't really like Apple to be honest, but the MacBook Pro is an outstanding product, both the hardware and software. I really don't want to go back to Windows ever again.

Programming in Java with IntelliJ instead of C# with Visual Studio

This is a closer one. I didn't really become friends with Java, but I did like IntelliJ. However, the way it went down I only stayed with Java for about a year, after that I changed position and did C++ for a couple of years - where I used AppCode (also from JetBrains that do IntelliJ), and after that I actually came back to C#, but now using Rider (also from JetBrains) as editor. And I must admit C# is the better of these languages, but as the JetBrains products are superior to Visual Studio I'm gonna call this a tie.

Writing tests with JUnit and Mockachino instead of NUnit and FakeItEasy

This one was for the worse. While JUnit and NUnit is kind of the same, Mockachino had nothing on FakeItEasy. Also I do like the testing syntax in C# better than in Java, it's even more for the worse. Luckily that sorted itself as mentioned in the previous section.

Persisting data with Hibernate to MySQL instead of Entity Framework to MS SQL

To be honest, I can't really remember this in enough detail to judge it, as it was only during the first year I did any persistence using database. After that I've been working with mobile client as platform, where I've either persisted on the device as files or by rpc calls to a server where the actual persisting was made by our backend developers.

Having SCM in Mercurial with SourceTree instead of Subversion with TortoiseSVN

Here's another tough one. Mercurial was quite confusing to me at first, but I eventually got to know it pretty good - just in time before we decided to change to Git. After that Git was quite confusing to me, but now I've gotten to know it pretty good too... but it sure took some time. Subversion was so much easier, and the time spent on helping less technical team mates was a lot less. And in our case I'm not really sure if the benefits of the distributed SCM was actually something we benefit from. Now when I'm comfortable with Git I kind of like it, especially I like the partial commits and the rebasing, but it does come to a cost. Think I'll just call this a tie, as it depends on the situation and skill levels.

Doing CI with Jenkins and Ant instead of CruiseControl and Make

I'm afraid I have to give this to CruiceControl, mainly due to all the problems we have had with Jenkins here. I really like Jenkins when it works, especially the Jenkins Pipeline, but CruiseControl just worked, and that's actually the top most feature I want in a build server.

Handling sprints and issues with Jira instead of Redmine

What to say about this one... I guess I don't really like either of them. Well, actually I guess I don't really like bug-tracking-systems at all. I think that Jira has the upper hand on Redmine though, as it's so much more widely used, and it's so customisable and have so many plugins, so it is hard to be a competitor.