Posts that either contain information about my career to date, talk about what I want from the future, and/or may contain helpful career advice.
I’m finally moving up from working behind the scenes to actually doing a (short) presentation for the LJC. I’m going to be giving a lightning talk on Wednesday at the AWS Elastic Beanstalk event, on the JCP – what it is and what our election to the executive committee means. Ben and Martin’s post gives … Read more
As an associate member of the London Java Community (LJC), I’m very pleased with the news that we won an Open seat on the Java SE/EE executive committee. The results show that we got an astonishing 47.5% of the vote – if an MP got voted in with that percentage the newspapers would probably be … Read more
The last two weeks, actual work has conspired to keep me away from the blog. How rude. I miss "the beach" already.
It seems only fair to summarise the lessons I have learnt whilst masquerading as an architect on a short consulting stint with Marc McNeill. Simon Brown at Coding the Architecture is much better at talking about this stuff than I am, but I need to update the blog with something!
We went live with ‘real’ customers this week just gone. It’s the culmination of nearly two years work for me personally, and three years for our company. It’s really nice to be live at last, and to have our name out there. It might (in fact, should) change the focus of our work. Without paying … Read more
…in fact, it’s actually a good thing.
What are our thoughts on putting all the letters after your name in a CV/resume? Pretentious? Or the only reasonable time to use all those letters?
After the acquisition of a company with offices in New York, I pestered my company outrageously until they got fed up and finally relented – they agreed to send me to the US.
To ease the transition, I chose to move onto a project which would allow me to start working in London and continue on the same team after I had moved to New York.
In the extreme over-excitement that followed my relocation, it took me a little while to realise that effectively I was an offshore resource, no different really from any of our Indian test team, and the team needed to manage this appropriately.
I learnt a number of lessons whilst playing this game. Some of these points are also valid for teams with remote resources (e.g. people working from home).
I know there are arguments against certification, and I definitely think that using certifiction to determine whether to interview or recruit people is downright daft, because frankly learning a bunch of answers isn't all that difficult. But I personally find that completing a certification really helps to round out my knowledge in an area. I guess my thoughts are that a fairly recent certification combined with the work experience to back it up is something that would make your CV more interesting to recruiters.
Hmm. I have been so busy trying to think of "good" things to write here, and not having the time to actually write, that I see it’s been 6 months since the last post. If anyone is still out there though, I need help. I need a good Certified Scrum Master course in New York … Read more