Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time

YES! My H1B petition has been approved by the USCIS. As soon as the documents are transferred here in a couple of weeks I will be ready to arrange an interview in the local Embassy. I am dying to see my approved petition but it will take a week or two more. The forecast is that it will be possible to get a visa stamped in my passport in late July. A potential risk is that additional background checks may be required because of the country I was born in but the future seems to be sparkling nevertheless.

Apart from the burgeoning H1B story, I had another round of technical interviews with the British financial institution. The interview was supposed to be the last one so this story is about to come to an end as well. I did not really enjoy the discussion this time. On the one hand, the connection was so poor that a few times I literally could not recognize words said by articulated Brits. It did hurt me to look stupid. On the other hand, the questions asked were rather far-flung and sometimes very difficult to address specifically (e.g. Why would we need a pointer to a reference? How would you compare web services with CORBA? Why SAN is better than a local drive? Compare Solaris and Linux. How to get a list of running processes in Unix?)

As for my day-to-day activities, my current project drew my attention to a few open source products. Curiously enough, I found that Maven is conceptually similar to a system we had at my previous company to manage configurations of a platform which had about 200 intertwined components. Kudos to the guy who envisaged and implemented our system, I did not appreciate it enough initially.

Another product I am working closely with is JasperServer. This is a web application designed to provide user-friendly GUI to the JasperReports report engine. Here comes the pain. Most of my life I was very careful to position myself as a server-side developer. Moreover, I thoroughly despised work on web GUI-related stuff. Nowadays I have to work in exactly those areas and boy, do I hate it. I am likely to be haunted by this dichotomy of Challenging-And-Exciting-Work-On-Advanced-Products vs Outsourcing-Drudgery-For-The-Sake-Of-GC for years ahead and I am not sure how to reconcile the conflict. Anyway, I figure I will elaborate on the topic in future postings.