Off to play racquetball for the first time in nine years. Hope I don’t lose an eye.

I take my kid for a walk yesterday and I am lost in thought comparing the philosophies of Seneca and Pascal. I am such a nerd.

Oh, the agony…

In my quest to acquire gainful employment as a programmer, I have wrestled long and hard with what skills to concentrate on in order to maximize “employability.”

I recently attended a local “unconference” on cloud computing which brought even more questions to the surface.

I also cannot count how many forums and blogs I have read written by those already in the industry on how to get into it.

And what have I come up with?

• Markets differ in their advisable skills sets.
• There are many different kinds of developers.

It seems that, right now, most open positions can be split into three camps: Java, .NET, and Web.

• Java is popular in the open source community. The majority of the Java jobs in my area require experience using J2EE in an enterprise environment. Not only that, they also typically desire two of the following: Spring/Hibernate, MySQL/PostgreSQL, and SOAP/JMS. One of the following may also be beneficial: application server experience (Tomcat/JBoss) or minimal Web skills (AJAX, CSS, etc).

• Web jobs require JavaScript, HTML and CSS at a minimum. Python, Perl or PHP skills help, and it is a good idea to have experience with SOA using REST. (If you are doing JS and have spare time and brainpower, familiarize yourself with a popular JS framework like jQuery or Django.)

• .NET doesn’t have the kind of open source following that GNU/Linux has, although it could be said that that is changing (slowly). It would pay to be well versed in one of Microsoft’s .NET languages (C# or VB.NET). There aren’t many open source .NET (Mono, IronPython, etc.) opportunities locally. In addition, .NET jobs seem to further split into Web and database.

• • If you like .Net Web, ASP.NET is a must, along with AJAX (or at least JavaScript).

• • If the database is your thing, get your feet wet with SQL Server, and for heaven’s sake, learn SQL (and XML if you have time).

(Be sure to add a dash of design patterns for flavor.)

There are truckloads of technologies that orbit around these core sets, and it can be tempting to learn the “hot” technologies to increase marketability.

I found I had a hard enough time trying to identify core skill areas and personal strengths and weaknesses. Everything else just served to divide my energy and attention, ensuring that I didn’t clock in any appreciable time using ANY of them. As a result, my mind became a vortex of frustration, confusion, trends, buzzwords and acronyms.

When all is said and done, you must stay true to yourself. Reflect and examine. Will you mind learning skills you don’t particularly want to learn? Do you want to do it for a living? What kinds of applications do you like to create? What kind of environment do you like to hack in? What software blogs do you find yourself reading, and what kinds of local user events do you attend (if any)? Would it be advisable to leverage that past experience?

As far as I was concerned:

• I graduated with my computer science degree last year (Java curriculum). Ever since then, I have been leveraging my Java knowledge to get up to speed on C# and .NET.

• The Java code I have right now is execrable, mostly because the larger apps were student projects. Spaghetti, anyone?

• I haven’t done much Java work since I graduated.

• I have been attending regular meetings of the Portland Area .NET User Group.

• I have just completed an Excel project here at work which required me to get up to speed quick on Visual Basic for Applications. It also required me to get cozy with SQL Server.

• I am in the middle of another project that uses C# and WinForms, also a desktop app.

With all that in mind, the C#/database track looks to be the wise choice. But if I want to make it a career, how does my local job market look? A cursory examination of many local job boards (Monster, craigslist, CareerBuilder, Jobdango, Dice, Indeed…) revealed numerous opportunities.

So do I mind living the .NET world for a while?

The framework is rich (well, rich enough) and its usage is widespread. .NET gives me the opportunity to tackle everything I’d like to at this point in time.

Going forward, I think C#, SQL and XML will continue to be the best areas to apply my energy. (Whew, glad THAT’S done…)

So….

public class devocatDotNet

{

public static void Main()

{

System.Console.WriteLine(”Hello, .NET!”);

}

}

I passed by a car lot today on McLoughlin and Park near Elks. Sign had picture of parrot. Overlay: “I was approved!” We never learn.

The Elephant is dying…

I was thinking today about the senators and representatives that conservative pundits often mention as their heroes, like Inhofe, Sessions, Bachmann, and DeMint. They are the “true patriots” – the “defenders of freedom against tyranny.” They are also often cited as among the most conservative members of either chamber.

 

And I thought to myself: What does this mean?

 

How about this: Speaking generally, depending on who might get what (and how) in any legislation under consideration, they will almost always vote a certain way.

 

-They won’t vote for any bill that may strain relations with Israel.

-They will vote against new government spending or bureaucracies.

-They seek to make flag burning and gay marriage unconstitutional.

-They will not vote for anything that may make life uncomfortable for business or corporations.

-They push for monotheistic religious worship in public schools.

-They see English as our national language and want it recognized as such.

-They generally disdain any environmental protection legislation for two reasons: jobs are more important than trees, and taxpayers would pay for that job loss.

 

I’d like to stress that these ideological positions are just my observations, and that people, just like legislation, are complex and have many parts.

 

In other words, I don’t mean to oversimplify, but my point is that it is easier to do so when looking at the record of the above legislators: predictable, ideological, and inflexible.

 

Of course here is the “million dollar question:” Is that bad?

 

Any important issue has numerous angles which should be evaluated carefully to determine overall impact. But to me, if you always “toe the party line,” that suggests intellectual stagnation, extreme partisanship and unwillingness to compromise.

 

I don’t think it is a secret that most of our legislators don’t read most bills. They don’t have time and the bills are dense. Also, consider the hundreds of bills pertaining to different facets of these perennial core issues they’ve voted on.

 

And they always vote a certain way? These are supposed to be heroes? We need a viable Republican Party in this country. The bitterness and anti-intellectualism are driving people away when they need new blood.

 

This philosophy among the movement’s leaders, that any sort of deviation amounts to betrayal worthy of the blackest scorn, will be the death of the right in this country if it prevails.

 

Aren’t new ideas, insights and movements (the wellspring of effective governance) vital to the continued success of any faction? Would it be too much to say that it is a sort of lifeblood? Without it, the organism dies.

 

Sometimes the ass needs a swift kick, right GOP?

The Prisoner: Episode 2. Leo McKern (Num 2) sees Num 6 takes no lumps. “Frightened of putting on weight?” “No, nor of being REDUCED.”

I get very nervous blogging about programming when I’m trying to find work in the industry. Scared I’ll just make myself look green.

Wow those angles are tasty!

A funny thing happened to me on the way to work this morning.

I was at Albertson’s buying some cereal.

Most of us are familiar with the generic knock-offs sold by the big chains (i.e. “Compare to Honey Smacks!”)

I was dumbfounded when I saw what Albertson’s named their Crispix clone:

Think I saw some Corn Spheres down the aisle...

Just how gentle is Ben?

I’ve grown pretty stoic when it comes to hearing news about morally dubious politicians and bureaucrats. A story I heard this morning on NPR, however, made my eyes grow as wide as dinner plates. It had to do with the takeover of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America late last year and something Fed chair Ben Bernanke said regarding the deal during a hearing on the Hill.

Here’s the gist:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Thursday pushed back hard against accusations the Fed threatened Bank of America executives if they halted a merger with Merrill Lynch or pressured them to withhold bad news about the troubled investment bank.

“Neither I nor any member of the Federal Reserve ever directed, instructed, or advised Bank of America to withhold from public disclosure any information relating to Merrill Lynch,” Bernanke told the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

What does this mean? Well, BoA execs were wary about taking on Merrill Lynch. Merrill’s huge problems would become BoA’s huge problems (read: shareholders), with the potential of bringing down the whole ship (not that there were no holes in the hull to begin with because of bad assets).

BoA CEO Ken Lewis alleges the feds threatened their jobs if they didn’t go along. Specifically, they admonished them to keep their mouths shut about Merrill’s problems. Bernanke says all that is hogwash. You would think the truth would be somewhere in the middle.

However, I read an article in last month’s issue of The Atlantic that was eye-opening. The author, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, basically says that because of misplaced faith and the “revolving door” between Wall Street and Washington, core crisis issues aren’t being addressed and taxpayers are getting fleeced.

But he also touches on a disturbing tactic employed by the feds:

The response so far is perhaps best described as “policy by deal”: when a major financial institution gets into trouble, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve engineer a bailout over the weekend and announce on Monday that everything is fine.

…

Treasury and the Fed did not act according to any publicly articulated principles, but just worked out a transaction and claimed it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. This was late-night, backroom dealing, pure and simple.

So we had no transparency and no oversight. Add a dash of panic, and what do you think might happen?

It is no secret that the international financial system is interconnected, and time was short if they wanted to shore up confidence in that system. Maybe Ben was just too eager…

Food for thought, anyway.

ABC remaking “V” for the 09-10 season. Is nothing sacred? At least have Baccarin eat a rodent. Recycling fond memories for quick $…ugh.