Competition is a key factor of the software industry.  It’s why the industry can get the talent, people, and entrepeneurial spirit that it has.  A problem has come back that is a familiar beast in the indusrty, everybody is short of 100% on staffing.  The key factors are still there in the staffing needs;  competancy, experience, education, determination, discipline, and of course attitude.  The problem I’ve noticed however is not the number of available people but the attitude and even the competancy and experience are just lacking.  Lately many candidates that I’m known to come onto projects are billed and sold by recruiters as far more advanced than they are or even sold to positions that the candidate isn’t even particularly looking for.

Currently the project I am on has been fortunate to find some great people that are of high competancy, senior level, and also have a great work ethic and attitude.  Our people have been some of the best I’ve seen in the industry too, no pressure selling here or urging candidates into positions they wouldn’t or shouldn’t be in.

We’re, in addition to having a little trouble finding enough of the perfect cadidates, rocking and rolling with the power team that we currently have.  Patterns and architectural work have been put into place that is allowing us to really start pushing forward, and sooner than later, we’ll be providing some real progress on the massive project I’m currently on.  I’ll be really happy though when ROI is realized by the company we’re working for.  I’ll know then that we’ve done far more than merely build a massive scalable and capable enterprise application, but we’ve helped improve the world for a few hundred thousand extra people in the world.

If anyone out there is looking for work, and you’re a senior level code person that cherishes good code, well written, with patterns, practices, and a good happy hour after work, I think my company is still looking so lets here from you if you’re interested in working in downtown Portland, Oregon (the coolest urban environment in the entire western United States).

– Yeah, yeah, Seattle and San Francisco are ok too. 

I started last night working some demo modules out of the Professional Community Server book from Wrox written by Wyatt Preul, Keyvan Nayyeri, Jose Lema, and Jim Martin.  The book has been a good starting point and for the most part well written, I do however have a few points of contention.  While working through the first sample with a fellow techie, he being a network engineer and myself being a software architect we barreled through the sample easily.  The problem however that I must draw is that the sample is unable to be directly (or indirectly tested) because it only sends an e-mail out “if” an exception of CSException occurs.  At the end of the example, compiled, put into the bin, and the config set properly, one then has to force a CSException?  Maybe I missed that chapter, but it seems this is a relatively weak sample.  Great book, but that one sample just irks me.

Otherwise I must say thanks to all who put together the book!  It’s been a great kick start!

To beat a dead horse and return to the problem point I have with that one example, when I get through developing a few other modules and am more familiar with exactly what I am doing, I will follow up with a module or two that provides the points I feel are missing.

As I sat down on the bus and hit the web via my Sprint PCS Wireless card I thought, “I really need a dedicated to do or task list application that I could deploy to my domain or somewhere on the web to maintain things with.”  Being that I’m a developer I didn’t want to just use some application I wanted to develop my own, at least control, have, and be able to change the code.  With that in mind off to Google I went.

With many of these standard sample type applications there are literally dozens on the web.  I thought it would be really cool though to specifically have AJAX and of course an ASP.NET based application.  In went the search string “ASP.NET AJAX Task List” and back came the results.  Again I see one of my favorite bloggers has content specifically on this wish list item of mine.  ScottGu has an entire write up on the AJAX enabled ASP.NET application.  In addition to that he linked the same app, plus a lot of other cool applications in another entry dedicated to great available apps.

With that in mind I was off to a good start on my endeavor.  More to come later…

So a while back (almost a year) I made an entry about speedtest.net.  Well I did another test and I got a smashing faster speed (just check the old speed records).  Then of course there is a “local” test location now which is a plus.  6,089 kb/s is very cool though!

Great development tools are always sought out by great developers.  One tool I found recently has kicked me off to start a list of my own cool tools that help me produce great software.  This first tool is ReSharper by Jetbrains software.  Go check it out at Jetbrains.  My list is available on a continuing basis via the files section of the site.