I'm mildly flattered to have been sort-of-headhunted by Google's US technical staffing team today. Apparently my...
experience at Pitch and strong educational background make [me] an excellent fit at Google.
Cool, thanks Google. But I'm not sure that you've researched me too well.
I found this hilarious.
Michael Stonebraker, co-creator of the Ingres and Postgres database management systems, recently made a blog posting suggesting that column-oriented database engines (example: Vertica) might someday triumph over the traditional row-oriented engines (example: every other database engine you know) in some situations, perhaps most notably the data-warehousing field. It's an interesting post, and well worth reading.
Just a quick post to mention that, yes, my commitment to TDD show no signs of abating, especially in the face of the various unfamiliar technologies with which I've been working recently.
Today I came across JsUnit. Which may be old news to many, but I don't stray into JavaScript territory very often, and when I do, I'm usually quite frightened!
Yep, the time has finally come. In the new year I'll be heading off to pastures new, and starting work over on the other side of Covent Garden, with the guys at Pitch. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about that.
I always said it would take something pretty special to tempt me to leave my current employer - it has been an invaluable experience - and in the end, it did.
One of things I've enjoyed most about my work over the last few years - one of the privileges of being a developer, as it were - has been working so closely with talented, driven people. It doesn't really matter whether you're speccing out a gritty DB schema with other developers, stepping through wireframes and storyboards with an interface designer, or having a heated debate about the place of PDFs on the web with senior management.
What's great is that everybody has an opinion, often diametrically opposed to your own. That's a great way to open your mind, and a great way to learn.
I'm finding more and more excellent, and very pertinent, content on Rob's site. In Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money he raises a few issues that will make a huge difference to a company's rate of developer 'churn'. And once again he hits several nails square on the head.
He doesn't mention chairs, but I think Joel has that one covered.
I enjoyed Rob's definition of Web 2.0 companies as being the ones that show up in your browser every time you mistype a domain name
. I don't know what you would have to type wrong to find either of our portals, so I guess we're not Web 2.0. But I can live with that.
Anyway, it's from a great article called Personality Traits of the Best Software Developers, which I found particularly interesting, since we're recruiting right now. I can see myself in at least a couple of those (I shan't elaborate!) so maybe I'm not doing too badly.
For a while now I've been taking exception to programmers being described (by management, by recruiters) as 'resources'. "We're hoping to take on a PHP resource", "I hear you're looking for a PHP resource?".
No, I'm really not looking for a resource, I'm looking for a programmer. Programmers have brains and ideas and solve problems and rarely stop thinking about creative ways to do complex things. They're not interchangeable programming units. At least, not here in Great Queen Street. To misappropriate something Martin Fowler said:
I'm intrigued, perhaps even impressed by Why's Try Ruby!, an interactive, in-browser Ruby tutorial. It really is quite a fascinating collision of technologies.
It's almost painfully Web 2.0 - I'm pretty sure most of the buzzwords are there - Ruby, Ajax, that sort of thing. All sat on top of the ubiquitous Json and Prototype libraries.
A recent conversation with a colleague reminded me of just how much I hate seeing programming language file extensions in URLs. You know - .php, .asp, .cfm and the like. There are several reasons why we avoid them like the plague.