I struggled last week. It was just one of those weeks where nothing seemed to be easy. The week started off nicely with me adding some more functionality to our distributed cache testing framework, that’s a peripheral and relatively new code base that I’m pretty familiar and comfortable with by now. But after that things started queuing up and I couldn’t close anything out.

First, I was asked to take a look at a customer issue involving Serialization of Terracotta-instrumented ConcurrentHashMap instances. The instrumenting we do on that class breaks Serialization of CHM instances between non-Terracotta processes and Terracotta processes. I’d like to blog about this separately, and actually I think someone smarter than me could do a PhD dissertation on how Terracotta instruments CHM (there’s a lot of it) and why it’s necessary. So in two days I was really only able to evaluate the bug, get it reproduced in a test case, and decide on an approach, but was not able to actually make a fix. That was disappointing.

Next, I was asked to see about removing the JSR 107 dependency from our ehcache TIM. By this time it was later in the week and I was packing for our trip to Florida, and I only finally found what I think is the problem while en route to Florida without an internet connection.

Thirdly, a teammate and India and I have been trying to do some followup testing on the initial cache testing I last blogged about, but it has been going slower than we’d like due to various roadblocks too boring to mention. Just a little while ago I committed some more functionality to our distributed testing framework which will allow us to vary the number of Segments used in CHM instances when we test, and that should’ve been done last week.

This week I’m going to make a concerted effort to eliminate potential distractions, and to better manage all the various feeds that bombard me. IM has to be on pretty much all the time, so my coworkers can reach me, but otherwise this week I’m going to turn of Twitter, RSS feeds and all e-mail for long stretches at a time and get…things…done! I’m also going to go to bed early (soon) and try to get up very early, take a walk to wake myself up, and get to work early. I’d like to do that all week and see if it helps.

My family and I are in Destin, FL for two weeks. I’m going to work this week and take next week as vacation. I’m excited to be down here and have a change of scenery, but at the same time I’m surrounded by many more potential distractions.