20+ years later or I finally became one! Part 4

Continuation of the story of the “bearded enikey”. The previous part is here .

Fourth attempt

As you, dear colleagues, probably guessed, my wings were broken: I flew out of the interview with a bang. A developer must still be able to program himself, and not just understand someone else’s code and fix errors. 24 levels on javarush.ru, and even half-forgotten by that time, were clearly not enough. Then a new project started, and learning Java had to be put on hold. I convinced myself that this would be no more than a month. Then - by two. Then again. And then I realized that I had already had a similar dead-end situation in my life, when I was afraid to get out of the “swamp,” and nothing good came of it. And now the situation, one might say, is ideal: foreign companies have literally “cleaned out” the personnel market, and the demand for Java developers is huge. We have to make a decision. It’s necessary, but it’s not clear what exactly should be done? Although, in fact, it is not clear why - summer vacation is ahead, and there is a website javarush.ru. A very obvious plan emerged:

1. Get to level 30 as soon as possible;
2. do a test task;
3. get to the autumn real project, which was about a month and a half away;
4. finish a real project;
5. receive an offer.

I haven’t yet decided what to do next - stay in this company or move to another, but I had more than enough time to think about it - at least six months. So, the content of the test task for the project is not yet known, but it is clear that it will be a web application using Spring . I decided to start by studying Spring, and with the current, 4th, version, and most books describe the 3rd. The search led to the book “Spring 4 for Professionals,” 4th edition (originally Pro Spring 4). The choice turned out to be extremely successful - along with the source code for the exercises downloaded from the book’s website, I received an excellent tutorial that literally took me step-by-step from creating a simple console application with dependency injection to a full-fledged web application with Spring MVC, JSP and data access via Hibernateand JPA 2.1. Among the shortcomings of the book, besides the not always high-quality translation, I would note that all source code examples use the Spring xml configuration, and there are almost no examples of Java configuration, which had to be studied from other sources. Meanwhile, many now consider the xml configuration to be outdated, and its use in a test task is a significant drawback. Two other books that helped me a lot are Spring persistence with Hibernate, 2nd edition (about Hibernate 5) and Java persistence with Hibernate, 2nd edition (about JPA 2.1), but they are worth studying after the first one. I would like to note that all three books are of a fairly high level, and for those who are looking for the fastest way to complete a test task, there are much simpler ways, including ready-made test tasks made by others. But who is being deceived in this way? And now vacation, IDEA, javarush and level 24. I passed it with a whistle and moved on. It turned out that the period of “team leadership” was not in vain, I realized many of my past mistakes and easily solved problems that had not been possible before. Levels 25, 26, 27... Stop, if I move at this pace, I will only get to the test task by the end of the vacation. I really didn’t want to, but I had to use a life hack found on the forum pages. Okay, there is level 30 and a test task, what do we have there? Well, in principle, after the book “Spring 4 for Professionals” it’s clear where to start, but we’ll see. Yeah, we'll see. In order for this... not very good application, which did not yet have a single line of meaningful code, to simply launch, I sat without stopping from 4 pm to 6 am. Damn dependencies that are always missing, component version conflicts, and a deep bow to stackoverflow. Well, by that time I had mastered maven and Google. Well, why doesn’t it say anywhere that the “foot wraps” of Spring stack traces should be decrypted not “from the beginning”, but “from the end”? I also had to configure automatic deployment to the application server in maven. After you upload an application manually 20 times, the question no longer arises as to why. Then things went somehow simpler; some things were not in the book, but the necessary examples were found on the Internet. The knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript, gained many years ago while trying to create web applications, and then digging into the front-end of the system, helped a lot. Administrative skills were also put to use, because I carried out all the development, naturally, under Linux (Ubuntu 16.04). I didn’t quite make it on vacation, it took a couple more days, but I managed to meet the deadline with a large margin. Check... accepted. After my vacation, work greeted me, let’s say, unfriendly. It seems that the oldest profession decided to interfere with my plans... To be continued .