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Monday, April 02, 2007

Some Software Inspiration

As I have said elsewhere, I am once again searching for jobs and a steady salary. I went to an interview last week where they asked me to name a technical book that had inspired me. I must admit that I fumbled the answer. I have read many software manuals and technical books; many of them were useful but I can't think of one that was really inspiring.
What is inspiring? On the other hand I am inspired by many other sources. I get a lot of inspiration from magazines. When I was working in California I enjoyed reading Software Development Magazine each month. It was inspirational to read all the latest concepts and applications.
Sometimes these advanced concepts can be a hindrance to my work. I read about Agile methods and Ruby on Rails and JavaBeans. Then I return to my work repairing thirty-year old RPG code while trying to convince my employers that code can be reused and, just perhaps, that speed of software development, careful design and code reuse is as important as compile speed or multi-level object inheritance.
Sometimes knowing that there is a better way to do things just leads to frustration. I often find that the guy who quietly sits at the back of the meeting and takes two months to do something that should take two weeks, is also the guy who is offered the full time permanent job with benefits while I am out looking for my next contract.
(I just had a look and saw that Software Development Magazine has merged with the ancient -- in computer terms -- Dr. Dobbs's Journal. Both of the magazines and several others are free to American residents but expensive subscriptions for Canadian residents). [By 2014 even Dr Dobb's had gone virtual]
Other magazines? I had a subscription to WIRED magazine for several years. In its glory days of the mid nineties this was a magazine that existed to provide inspiration. I like high style, effective colours and good graphics. WIRED had them all. It also had lots of good ideas and thoughts on everything digital.
Where did they go wrong? They managed to both get too conventional at the same time that they got more weird in appearance. While in the earlier years they would use graphics to illustrate a point and provide information, it seemed that they became dedicated to the look without the additional concentration on useful information. There were far to many pages with something like silver type on purple paper designed just to make the reader squint. While in the early days WIRED would provide pages of useful and inspiring pages at the beginning they evolved having many many pages of advertising in the same place. WIRED became the Vogue of the computer industry.
Current Magazine Inspirations I currently have subscriptions to several general business and news magazines. I read Fortune magazine because of its practical information and left-wing bias. Left-wing? I don't think that there is another magazine that has done quite as authoritative biographical evisceration of the average American 'C' level executive suite. As often as they insist that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are business gods; they also give us lots of stories about their foibles and all so human eccentricities. After reading those exposés I find it hard to think of the average great financier or CEO as anything more than reasonably smart and well-educated people with good luck and supportive families.
When Fortune is at its best -- doing an in-depth corporate evisceration or essay on the business costs of American medical costs -- it makes one want to stand up and change the system. If only I had the power.
A final business magazine inspiration is Business 2.0. This is the slimmer, hipper and more concise version of Fortune. Lots of stories about the Web and things digital. I normally find myself folding over many page corners as bookmarks before I finish an issue.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Recent Training in Crystal Reports

In late 2006 and early 2007 I undertook to learn something about using Crystal Reports. This is the report writing software package that is now owned and distributed by BusinessObjects. I signed up and took four online web courses at the BusinessObjects web site. Apparently they have the full course content of the classroom versions at half the cost. I completed them and finished by the end of January.
The course work went fairly fast -- I had already used a dozen different report writing packages over the years. I hope that I find some use for all this training since I am currently unemployed and looking for work.
Crystal Reports is one of Vancouver's software success stories. I can remember applying unsuccessfully for jobs 20 years ago in their little office on Pender Street in downtown Vancouver. Considering all the big software success stories on the West Coast of the US it is interesting that there are so few big success stories from Vancouver. We have companies that have done well here -- such as AccPac or Entertainment Arts -- but they always seem to get bought out by a much larger company.
I think that it might have something to do with our old resource based economy. We have long been a world centre for things like Fish Processing, Mining and Forest Industry companies. At the same time that Seattle was making Boeing jets, Fremont California was making Fords and LA was making movies; we in BC were making cedar shakes and canned salmon. I am not sure how the fact that San Jose, CA was the apricot centre of the world fits into this theory, but it there must be some reason that Hi-Tech never took off in the same way here as it did further south.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Current Contract Work

Most of my work in the last ten years has been contract employment. Some of these have been short term but they have also lasted as long as 2 years. I like long term employment but the regular jobs that come my way always seem have some glaring problem. Among other things, I have had great luck in picking companies soon before they either go under or get swallowed up.
That has put huge holes in my resume.
It is always a toss-up whether to include an interesting computer experience or to leave off yet another short term job. Some of those short term jobs have been great learning experiences but it is hard to explain that in 20 words or less on a resume.
Even my formal education has been somewhat ill-fated. In 2003 I spent three months of the summer learning Internet Programming at a place in Vancouver named Corporate Communications Training College (CCTC). Apparently though they were fiddling with the books and a couple years later they closed their doors without notice.
Contract work has its upside and downside. The money is good and it has given me a degree of freedom. I can take a holiday when I want and I set my own hours. But that supposed freedom has some big costs. When I take that holiday I am not paid for my days off. And when one contract ends one never knows when the next one will start.
Most years it is almost as hard work to look for employment than it is to actually put in 8 hours in an office.
Contracts have taken me to a lot strange situations from here to Mississippi. That is my biggest strength on the job market. There are plenty of software employees who have done the same thing for a decade or two. When things are chaotic or ill-designed or ill-fated I have had lot of experience in just those sorts of situations. I ask lots of questions, I learn fast and I get along with a wide variety of people. That is one of my strengths.

Sunday, October 15, 2006