Is London shrinking?

The old expression that "it's a small world" rally rang true for me today.

On my way home from a job interview this afternoon I thought that I recognised an old friend from New Zealand queuing up to use an ATM. Sure enough it was! After nine and a half months I have finally bumped into someone that I know from back home.

As if that wasn't enough, when I attended the London Spring User Group meeting this evening I ended up chatting with one of the 2 people who had interviewed me for a different job yesterday afternoon! Wait for it, later in the meeting I recognised the name of one of the attendees who had won a book in the feedback survey prize draw. Down at the pub for the obligatory socialising and networking afterwards I inquired as to whether he was a recruiter - sure enough it was the agent that I have been dealing with for the job the same job. SMALL WORLD.

This month's Spring user group session was focussed on Spring Batch and what is coming up in Spring 3.0.

I found that I appreciated the details of Spring Batch much more this time around, as opposed to when I first saw a presentation about it - after lunch at the Spring in Finance seminar day back in September 2008.

Seeing the list of what will be removed or deprecated in version 3.0 of Spring made me feel better about not knowing "which controllers" I had used in my experience of Spring MVC - a question that came up in a recent job interview by phone. The hierarchy of form controllers are being ditched in favour of the annotation based approach. So, I have only been using the latest APIs - still doesn't hurt to read about the old way of doing things (even if the MVC chapter in my reference book is 100 pages long).