AncaA's tech journal

Slashdot writes:

“In this 15-minute TED talk, Johanna Blakley addresses a subject alien to most here — fashion — but in a way sure to grab our attention. The lesson is about how the fashion industry’s lack of copyright protection can teach other industries about what copyright means to innovation. And yes, she mentions open source software. There is one killer slide at 12:20 comparing the gross sales of low-IP-protection industries with those of films and books and music. If you want to know more, or if you prefer text, the Ready To Share project website should give you all the data you crave on the subject.”

IT services societies encourage you to work in any project, no matter the technology, but they recruit people with a certain profile/expertise. You usually work in industrial projects that use ancient technologies. How are you supposed to reinforce your competences?

And here are the answers i received to my dilema:

A1: Technical Recruiter

Encouraged is and should not be synonymous to forced. At least not in a normal company. Realistically speaking, “technology flexibility” is sometimes misunderstood, or used as an excuse for “Let’s accept anything we can get our hands on, but let’s not employ specialists. We can manage with what we already have and still keep low operational costs”.

I have been recruiting IT specialists for almost 4 years now and I can tell you that I’ve seen a lot of people that were specialized in one main technology (and it’s associated technologies).
So, if your employer makes you change technologies more often than you change your socks, you should seriously think about changing your job. It’s not possible, for anyone, to do everything right. You should choose a path, and try to stick to it.

A recruiter will surely ”buy” your profile if you prove to be/have:
- Stable. Not changing your job every year or so helps a lot.
- Certified. Depending on your field of expertise, there is surely some certification you could get – ex: Sun Java Certifications, Microsoft Certifications, etc. As your skills progress, you should get the certification that is correspondent to your level. For example, for Sun Java Certifications, you would have: SCJA -> SCJP -> SCJD / SCWCD / SCDBC / SCDJWS / SCMAD -> SCEA.
- Relevant experience and portfolio. Depending on the recruiting project in question, a recruiter will try to find people that have been working on similar projects, clients, types of industries, etc., and have the experience necessary to do the required job.
- Undertaken the normal steps in your career positions. It’s important for a recruiter to see that you have been a Junior Developer, Developer and then Senior Developer prior to being a Team Leader.
- Specific about your contribution towards the projects you were involved in. Don’t be lazy, write a couple of sentences about what you’ve worked on, what were your responsibilities, etc. Of course, be honest about all of those. It will help you a lot, considering that a good recruiter will appreciate the information and will be able to advertise you better when presenting your profile to the employer.
- Good recommendations. Always helps to be recommended by prior colleagues, employers, clients, etc. For obvious reasons.

Do all of those, try to be a good professional, be realistic and you shouldn’t have any problem in getting the job you want.

A2 : Senior Developer

One of the interesting area’s of application development is the topic of design patterns. Patterns to solve coding issues which have been proven effective. Specifically in the area of object oriented programming and client server programming patterns are extremely useful.

If you are able to learn patterns, and you can show that you are able to apply these pattern in the languages you mention any recruiter you have a very good story about your expertise.

Programming languages differ, patterns do not and are a stable starting point. Good luck !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_%28computer_science%29

A3 : Technical Manager

Consider vendor neutral industry recognized certifications such as those offered through CompTIA. Whether it is A+, Network+, Security+ or some other certification, they all were developed through contributions from IT industry leading companies with the intent of establishing baseline or benchmark knowledge that could be built upon with vendor specific training.

When preparing an interview for a job, it’s good to have an idea of what the recruiters are interested to hear about your work.

Here are some of the answers that some of them gave me.

A1:

- Doing what is needed and add Creativity (there are S/W programmers who finish their project in less than 50% of time.how?)
- Project Deliverables.
- Stick to Time Line, bug/error free coding.
- Assist your peers, their non-performance or issues effects team work.
- Share your stuff, don’t keep than MAGIC coding/idea to yourself – Share the knowledge.

A2:

1) Proven ability to build clean, documented, scalable software.
2) Acknowledged achievement in building a product that was successfully brought to market.
3) Reputation of thinking beyond the technology, and more in terms of how software helps solve a business problem.

A3:

The following are a must:
-Functional without bugs
-Clean code with documentation
-User friendly interface

Give exactly what the user wants!

A4:

The greatest achievement is to stay one or two steps ahead of the curve with the new releases of your SW language and or tools

A5:

1. Delivering expected results
2. Meeting the deadlines
3. Clear and documented code (so every person that will continue your work will not need to call you)
4. See the big picture not only that of your part (i.e. perfect integration of what you deliver within the project).

Whenever you are writing your CV, all the good practices say that you should make sure to state your achievements and your results.

But, when working as a developer, what can be considered an achievement ?

Unlike a salesman, that can say how many products he sold, how can the developer evaluate his work ? Or how is his work evaluated ?

I have asked this question and here are the answers that I received from people with a quite diverse background :

From an academic researcher :

A developer is a simple black-box-machine:
- input: software specifications
- output: piece of software that fills the requirements of the specification.

You have to evaluate the quality of the output (the software: the code + the documentation + tools + etc.).
Quality is represented by many parameters:

- amount of requirements that are or not implemented
- amount of bugs and security leaks
- maintainability ,portability ,brute performance ,elegance ,time needed

Then, as it is heavily non-linear, you have to find scales for each parameter, giving higher coefficients for what is the most important for you.

From a project manager :

The work of a software developer could be evaluated using the metrics “man*days”.
A software developer (programmer) receives from a functional analyst a “specification” to (software) develop and a dead-line (each specification is previously estimated, as if the development is realised by a medium level programmer) and estimations are included in MS Project planning by PM).
By comparing programmer’s results with estimation you have a clear report between a programmer qualified “medium level” and the studied human resource.

From a senior consultant :

If the product of a software developer is software, then you are measuring the quality of the software (using whatever criteria you normally use), and the quality of the code. It also depends on how much freedom the developer has.
For example, implementing a routine specification using an rigidly established set of methods (paint-by-numbers programming) would have a different set of standards from open ended problem solving.

From an HR person :

- Education background
- Number of years of experience
- Number of quality projects executed
- Customer feedback
- Certifications on domain or technology
- Respect and conduct in team

The greatest achievement is to stay one or two steps ahead of the curve with the new releases of your sw language and/or tools

From an entrepreneur :

As a company owner, we consider lot of factors, some are measurable and some are not.

Following are some of them:

- He/she should understand client’s perspective and do the work by considering project as their own. This is vital as currently the developers are working for the sake of money and complete the things quickly whatever assigned by managers. They do not think out of box about the projects and related issues.
- They should be good team player. I believe that at last team wins not a single performer. So he should work easily in any team.
- Quality in whatever he develops. We measure this by review of code as well as the bugs produced by the module done by them.
- The last but most important is he must be quick learner. In Software industry, there are lot of things regularly updating and changing. And in such environment, if developer just do one work with great value doesn’t count. There should be some motivation into developer to learn new things quickly and also apply those into the project.

Looks like the facination for Web 2.0 is an anthropological revolution for the human kind.
I’m curious to see what the Web 3.0(besides his marketing purpose) will bring us.
In the meantime, I think one of the first steps has been made by the search engines like Wolfram Alpha.

In the last days I have been working on an idea I had a while ago: I am talking about a website dedicated to the Romanian community in Toulouse.

It contains practical informations about living in Toulouse and it aims to provide a starting point to the ones visiting or living in this region of France.

Some very useful tutorials and demos that I’ve found about implementing OpenGL:

• Nehe Tutorials
• Zeus Tutorials
• Public API Implementations
• OpenGL ES Implementations
• Glut
• Glut ES
• GlUT Windows Libraries
• GLUT on Windows

As I received many e-mails regarding how to start learning program on Windows Mobile I will include here some of the tutorials that I’ve found very useful:

• Comparison in choosing the good technology for developing in Windows Mobile
• How to start programming a Windows Mobile Application
• Win32 Tutorial
• Framework for .Net Mobile Development
• Testing tool – Application Verifier for Pocket PC
• Windows Mobile Programming Tips and Techniques

At the beginning my dilemma was if to use the .Net Compact framework or not for my application. It was quite difficult to integrate it with Open GL ES so I decided not to use it.