Thoughts from the underground

It has been roughly 6 months since I left Dassault Systemes or should I say Dassault left me. I was very excited when I left and felt it was time to move on with my career. I learned alot about myself and where I want to go not only in career but in my life.

I was approached and continue to be approached for many projects. Some dealing with hardware and some dealing with software. I am still acting CTO for a chain of nutritional centers. I take care of all the technical needs which are hardware issues for the most part.

I was involved in various software projects from video editing to the auto part rebuilder industry. Along the way I learned some tools of the trade. I learned to read technical blogs like I read the morning paper. I learned to network. To always carry my business card. I learned that I love learning about new technology. I learned that I have so much to learn..

There are many personal lessons I learned as well.

I am coaching the Covina national little league Braves.  I started my own adult basketball team with my friends that has become a year around affair. I also play basketball Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 5:30am with a bunch of old guys at the gym and I really look forward to it. I learned that I enjoyed spending time with my family, my extended family and my friends much more then I remembered.

Along the way I also interviewed quite a bit. I am looking for team lead or a management position and truth be told I may have talked my way out of some developer positions. However, I remember driving home from downtown LA or El Segundo after an interview and asking myself how I ever drove from Covina to Woodland Hills everyday for 5 years?

How would I ever make the 4:30 practice for my little slugger? How would I ever make the 6:30 basketball game in Alhambra?

In the end I learned that I want a job that supports everything I leaned in the last six months.

What to do? Find the perfect job or find the perfect office for my business….

I  don’t make resolutions but rather I set goals for myself at the start of the year. I do not always achieve them all but this year I am determined to get to as close as 100% as possible.  I am making these public so that I can have more accountability….Here we go with the goals for 2010…

Professional:

IEEE CSDP Certification – Took the test in Dec…Find out the results in Feb

Sun Certified Java Programmer

Sun Certified Web Component Developer

Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD)

Maybe – Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA)

ACE ColdFusion -

Ambitious I know but I think definiatly doable. I feel this will certify my “Application Architect” Title

Sports:

Pasadena Tri in March

WildFlower Half Ironman in May

Mudrun in June

Tri in August

Muddy Buddy in November

Wildflower is the big one….

There it is…wish me luck!

I wanted to get into iPhone development but it was a little hard to even get the environment needed to develop. The biggest issue was the need to develop on a Mac….well in Q1 of 2010..you will be able to develop iPhone apps with flash cs5…recompile the same code and use the resulting swf for the mobile Droid OS..for Blackberry, etc…That is pretty awesome…Check out a tutorial at IPhone App..

You can also build augmented reality apps..This stuff is really cool…again same site for the tutorial AR App

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In some states it is happening folks. The IEEE reports that the Principles and Practices Exam for software engineering will become available in 2012. Thte states that have requested the exam are Michigan, Missouri, New York, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas and Virgina. No California yet. Only software engineers offering their services directly to the public would need to be licensed.  If you work for a sizable company where the company’s resources can aborb any liability…you will not need to licensed.

Only software projects that affects the health, safety, and welfare of the public would require oversight by a licensed engineer.

With anyone that can write a line code calling themselves a software engineer I welcome licensure for software engineers. I am hoping this starts to filter out programmers from software engineers.

http://www.todaysengineer.org/2009/Sep/Software-PE.asp

I had the privilege to work for a company that practiced the very definition of software engineering. We were exposed to the complete software development life cycle.  I also had the honor of working with and learning from  some very intelligent senior software engineers.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for my former manager. I would really like to use him and his approach to software engineering and software management as a template for my career. He had a pet peeve about calling ourselves programmers. I can still see him now pounding his fist on his desk whenever one of us called ourselves a programmer. He insisted that anyone can write code but a software engineer understands the SDLC and the core principles of software engineering.  That has always stuck in my head. More so when I started to develop more complex web applications with different programming languages on the web platform.

Programming languages are  tools that implement and adhere to the core fundamentals of object orientated software development. Programming languages for the  web platform are no different. I started with web programming in 1998 and back then object oriented design for the web was unheard of…not anymore. As more software goes to the web the programming languages become more and more like traditional object orientated languages. If a software engineer understands the fundamentals of software engineering he can easily pick up any of these languages.

That is why I have been surprised as to potential employers requiring tests on specific frameworks or programming languages in order to gauge the knowledge of the potential employee.  I recently took two tests as part of my application process and I really did not understand the point. Before anyone assumes that I am complaining because I bombed the tests….the first test was on .Net 3.0 and I got called for my second interview the next day. So apparently I performed well on the test. The second test was on ColdFusion MX 7. I was told at the time I scored the highest on the test.

However, I do not think they were anyway true measures of my skills or talent as a software engineer. Questions such as “What component would you use if you were presenting a user with a calendar” or “Name the upgrades from ColdFusion 6 to Coldfusion 7″ do not tell the hiring manager anything about my abilities as a software engineer.  With these types of questions I would fail a “CNext” test and I worked with that framework for 11 years.

In the end, I find it ironic that people are looking for “Software Engineers” and trying to screen them out with these tests especially in the web development. The web is still the wild wild west..with new frameworks and programming lanagages coming out every year. But all these still follow the core fundementals of software engineering..So I would think that hiring mangers would want to hire someone that understands this and can quickly learn the tools (programmin lanagues) rather than a “programmer” that can become obsolete as his programming lanaguge of choice becomes obsolete.