Back in 2006 I started a project called JobMan. It was inspired by GTT (Getting Things Done) methodology. Its primary purpose was to facilitate the quick creation of projects that could be broken further and further down into smaller and smaller tasks. As they say in GTT you cannot complete projects, only tasks related to the projects. I also wanted to be able to accurately log the amount of time spent on a project.
The initial UML drawings for the project are given below:
I intended to use other open source projects where possible and did so for a date picker and DB40 for an embedded database. Also at the time I was more intent on learning than creating something that would be used by someone other than myself. Hence, after the initial design, I coded and created features on a whim. I poured my mind out into my coding and tidied it up afterwards, usually when I found a bug.
The project was important in my development as it made me realise that projects need planning to avoid massive restructuring later. I learnt that design patterns could solve the problems I previously procrastinated over. Also my UI design needed work, which prompted me to buy ‘Filthy Rich Clients’ by Chet Haase and Romain Guy,although some of their work is now redundant given the slow rise of JavaFX2.
By 2009 I released the project on sourceforge and then released its current version in 2016 after spending quite some time using it in my current position. From this usage a number of bugs were fixed and the project optimised, e.g caching, listing subtasks by reference and not by objects.
