It's been a while....

Yes, it sure has been a while since I last posted. I have been kept busy, moreso in the more recent weeks since joining Google. I am recruiting for their online sales organisation internally, looking for multilingual candidates for a variety of opportunities in Google EMEA HQ, here in Dublin.

I have also been fortunate enough to join the Social Recruiting Task Force so we will be looking to optimise our efforts to attract talent through these channels. more info to follow! But please join our Facebook group to the right of this page

Dealing with Redundancy

New figures released today have confirmed that the ESRI have predicted that unemployment in Ireland will reach 17% by the end of 2010, and that Ireland will be hit harder than any other industrialised country by the recession we find ourselves in.  To be honest I am a little shocked.  Shocked that we could be the worst in the developed world, but when I look at who is steering the ship it makes sense...

More and more people are finding themselves out of work through redundancy, and I met with someone last night at a Recruiting Networking event that has put together a site called survivingredundancy.ie.  It has good information for both employers and employees on it.  

The Recruiting Industry seems dead at the moment.  Looking at the usual job boards, I have never seen such low activity.  Irish Jobs for example only have 26 Software Dev roles advertised , which represent just 13 companies.  From talking to internal recruiters it appears they are going to focus strongly on hiring directly from candidate pools and avoiding the use of any third parties.  Neither Bank of Ireland or AIB have a single IT job advertised, sign of the times indeed.  So what is to be done?  Where is the activity going to come from?  Is what the ESRI saying going to turn out to be true?  Do we have to wait until we hit rock bottom at the end of 2010 before we can recover?  So many questions!!  DISCUSS!!  

Arnie on the IT industry

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0306/1224242362550.html

Arnei

The coders dresscode

I found this pretty funny, it's a pretty much "who's who" in terms of forefathers of Software, and you can see a recurring theme when it comes to appearance and dresscode.  So, when you're interviewing Developers, you need to have an open mind 

"In vogue" C# related technologies

I recently asked the C# Pro's Group on LI what technologies are floating their boat at the moment and here are some of the answers I received;

"As manager over development, I get most excited about Team Foundation Server and the enhancements that are being released. It's about time that we move into a modern era of source control and I've found it to be exceptional for doing what we need ... in addition to the built-in test suites. 

As a hands-to-keyboard coder, I also love ReSharper (don't leave home without it, Visual Studio always seems to be one step behind them), controls. 

I'm also excited about the potential of the data dude edition of Visual Studio but it has a ways to go before it replaces some of the other third-party tools out there for data modeling and scripting"

"Even if it's not necessarily C#, for me it's RIA with WPF/Silverlight. 

It allows to develop really interactive web applications. "

"RIA Development: Silverlight 2, ASP.NET MVC (currently tech preview I think),ASP.NET AJAX, XSLT and XHTML, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (with SP1) and Microsoft Expression Blend 2 (again with SP1). 

Backend Development: C# 3.0, .NET Framework 3.5 (with SP1), WCF (Windows Communication Foundation for SOA application development). 

Windows Development: WPF 3.5, SQL Server, LINQ, Parrallels, Windows Mobile 6. 

I'd focus on ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight 2 for web Development, WCF for SOA development and WPF for windows development. Be sure to use the latest C#3.0 enhancements including LINQ. "

"LINQ for collections is a great elegant way to make queries to a bunch of data. 

Silverlight 2 is a great improvement to the web GUIs, but it needs to be more mature as it's just in the beginning. Early adopters will face some difficulties because the user base isn't as big as the ASP.NET ."

"I think most C# devs tend to salivate over purely Microsoft-produced stuff, but something else that I think will soon get everyone excited is jQuery:http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/28/jquery-and-microsoft.aspx"

"ASP.Net MVC is something I'm playing around with right now and it's definitely very nice. Mix it up with LINQ, WCF and jQuery stuff and you've got a nice little research project on your hands. 

Start getting used to REST too."

"1. Salivating, eh? Parallel programming is the first candidate. Just doing its babysteps in .NET but looks *very* promising. (Keep tabs on Joe Duffy and Daniel Moth blogs and, of course, http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam ). 

2. Data contracts. Compile time checks for pre- and post-conditions in your internal and external APIs. (Check out at http://research.microsoft.com/contracts/ ). It's not actually a C# feature but a .NET library, so any .NET language can give it a try. IMPORTANT NOTE: research license only (yet), not sure about the plans. 

3. Entity Framework goes next. Well, let's admit LINQ to SQL is dead (hmm?) so if you haven't invested in any existing ORM yet, EF is something you *should* have a look at.. and it's more than a mere mapper, as some people say :). 



As for already mentioned here and widely adopted technologies, 

* MVC is really powerful, especially for large scale web apps (if you're just starting or can afford the migration). They in MS have done a great job for smooth integration with "good old" ASP.NET - cool things like charts (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx ) can be easily integrated into an MVC app. 

* WCF is cool although it's quite old and doesn't seem to be getting a lot of frenzy because it's not about pretty UI :) "

"Even if the question is "for c# developers" I really appreciate PowerShell to automate deploys of Web Application http://www.codeproject.com/KB/install/DeploySite.aspx"

"Hello Noel, 

Great Question! 

All of the above are great answers. Nth Penguin (the company I work for) has a C# generation tool called WebWidgetry that's a plug-in for Visual Studio (open source GPL). 

We have some very powerful features that will be added in upcoming releases. As it sits today, you can build a SOA enabled, long running, single page AJAX application in a fraction of the time you'd spend using other .NET tools. 

Check it out at: www.nthpenguin.com "

All of the above have given me plenty of reading to follow up on but all good information

Software Sucks!

Check out this interesting essay on why Software sucks;

http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/46-why-software-sucks/