
Today I drove about 1000 miles in 14 hours. Naturally, I felt sleepy sometimes. I’m conscious of the
danger of driving when you’re almost falling asleep, so I developed some practices to avoid these
types of situations.

The most popular way to avoid getting sleepy when driving is to drink an energy drink or a lot of
coffee. It’s a useful technique, but it’s also not the best on your health.

My two preferred methods are to either listen to a podcast that demands some concentration or play a
music that I know the lyrics so I can sing along. The first method is the one that I use the most.
On top of making me stay awake, I'm learning stuff and reflecting about things that interest me. The
focus on the content of the podcast will keep you awake.

If the previous techniques don’t work for you stop driving. Stop somewhere, turn off your car, and
fall asleep wihile holding the car’s keys in your hand. When the keys drop off your hand because you
passed out, you’ll be good to go.


How to Stay Awake While Driving


During the past month, I experienced a growth in confidence in many activities. I became more
confident doing hard trail runs, driving boldly, and speaking to other people.

Confidence improves your performance in almost every aspect. The lack of hesitation will make you
more efficient. For example, when I was running a trail in Yosemite last week, two persons that were
physically more capable than me tried to run against me. Even though they were in better shape than
me, I was able to win the race because I was feeling confident enough to take bigger risks by
jumping between rocks.

However, there is a caveat. The more confidence you acquire, the more you will be willing to take
risks that can put you in danger. Let’s take the common example of driving. During your first month
driving, you don’t feel confident enough to drive boldly. You’re afraid that you’ll crash or do
something wrong. With more experience, you start to try new things. You’ll drive faster when there’s
no one in the street. If you take even more risks, you might crash.

One way to be safe and still enjoy your confidence is sensitizing yourself with learning and
emotions. One can remember the consquences of car accidents or learn about stories of people broke a
leg after doing a challenging trail run.


The Balance Between Confidence and Safety


It’s not uncommon to hear that people who come back from long travel have changed. Why is this the
case? How can a simple trip to another place on earth changes someone's character and beliefs?

When we’re abroad, our usual environment changes. Our routines are broken. Your days are different.
The people we pass by on the street, the landscapes, and the place we use to sleep. Many times all
these changes incentivize you to get out of your comfort zone. You start to become more curious
about the culture, the people, and the environment around you. You want to explore a forest, and
meet a stranger in the street and hear his story. It pushes you to experiment and go to place you
wouldn't go otherwise.

Talking with different people, exploring new worlds, and enjoying new experiences can change your
perception of the world. For myself, it did change how I interact with people. I started to become
more outgoing and confident with social interactions. It’s now common for me to interact with a
stranger on the street or go alone in a bar and meet new people.

Two months ago, I would never dare to do it. I was too afraid of how people would react. What would
they think of me?

Surprisingly all those things could’ve been achieved in my home country, but the incentives weren’t
in place. Here the people are already more outgoing, so I feel more comfortable talking
spontaneously to people. Also because I’m not in a routine, I’m always looking for new experiences
to fill my day. I don’t want to spend a day on a couch. I want to see what’s out there.


How traveling can be used as a self-development tool.

Travel as a Self-Development Tool


During the first semester of this year, I developed a few Java EE web projects. Before starting to
code and build something, I needed to decide how I would structure and organize the application’s
components. After researching for a moment, I became obsessed with these concepts. There were so
many different ways to structure an app, and I wanted to find the most appropriate one for the
project needs.

Java EE offers resources that you can use for developing a web app. Like for example, Servlets and
JSP. But it’s the responsibility of the developer to decide how he will make use of those. There are
many design patterns that offer practical ways to structure web apps.

The one that I already knew was MVC (Model View Controller). It’s probably one of the most well know
pattern, but it’s also the most confuse one. Nowadays, it became a buzzword to indicate that we are
separating the presentation layer from the model layer. It isn’t anymore a well-defined pattern as
it was during the Smalltalk time. The problem is that we hardly implement the original MVC in the
web world because the web is per nature request based. We had to adapt it to the web needs. This is
where enter the [JSP Model 2](http://www.javaranch.com/journal/200603/frontman.html), also known as
MVC Model 2.

## MVC Model 2

MVC Model 2 was introduced as a solution to architect Java EE web applications in a way that would
be easier to scale it. It separates the application code in three parts:

### Model

The model includes all the business rules of the application. That means that it’s responsible for
ensuring the data integrity. He’s also in charge of the communication with any data source.

### View

The view is in charge of the presentation layer of our application. It dictates in what form our
data will be served. In the context of the MVC Model 2, the view is represented by JSP files.

### Controller

Finally, the controller is in charge to ensure the communication between the model and the view.
It’s also responsible for receiving client requests and direct them to the appropriate resources.
The controllers are the Servlets in the MVC Model 2.

## Structuring the Model

With the MVC Model 2, I found a solution for how to separate the presentation layer to the model
layer. But I still needed a way to structure the model. After spending hours researching, I became
familiar with a few design patterns used on the model side.

### Domain Objects

A domain object is a plain old Java object that represents an entity of the domain of our
application. For example, a domain object named “Book” would be an abstraction of a book in real
life, if we were designing an app for a library. This object would incorporate domain rules that
ensure that the business norms are enforced. If the library doesn't allow numbers in Book names, the
domain object shouldn’t allow it.

### Active Record

Active Record is a pattern that became popular with the Ruby on Rails framework. The idea is to get
the data access logic of the application inside domain objects. Consequently, a domain object will
incorporate code to access a SQL database, for example. The problem of this pattern is that it
produces a strong relationship between our application and our data source. It will be hard to
switch to a different type of data source in the future without modifying some important objects of
our application. The benefit is that it’s easy and quick to implement.

### Data Mapper

Data Mappers can be used instead of Active Record. It separates the data access logic from the
domain objects into a data mapper object. This object will contain all the code to access the data
sources. Then, if our application needs to switch to another data source, we won’t need to modify
our domain objects.

## The App Architecture

After analyzing those design patterns, I used them in one application that I’ve written about in a
[previous blog post](/post/web-app-from-the-ground). One thing that I haven’t talked about that is
in the diagram below is that I separated the controllers into two types. View controllers and action
controllers. A view controller is directly linked to a view. It can, for example, get the necessary
data for a view and forward the client request to that view. On the other hand, an action controller
will perform actions like delete, add or edit. You could have an action that adds a new book to our
application.

![Application architecture](/images/posts/omwa-architecture.png)


A short explanation of the patterns that I encountered during project researches.

How to Stay Awake While Driving

The Balance Between Confidence and Safety

Travel as a Self-Development Tool

Exploring Design Patterns with Java EE