Just recently did I (re)start doing interviews for the positions we have open (from java to C++ to Scala etc.), but I already started enjoying them. Whenever it's a junior position – a grad, an intern – or a lateral, senior position, usually after the first two minutes I can tell whether someone would fit to my group – it's not a particular question or topic. It's more the presence of a given glint in the eye that tells the candidate is a kind that likes to look under the hood, does not accept an answer without an explanation – e.g. she/he is someone that would fit the team. Recently I came across a link on mashable about a few questions to ask yourself before accepting a job; here is my view on the topic:

"Are serious goals being sacrificed?" – my goals were having a team, but still code as nuts; use cutting and bleeding edge technologies but do have a safe net (startups not being the safest nest while having family to take care). By having extensive possibilities to do flexible work arrangements, overall I do see a strong overlap between what I aim for vs what I get. And yes, career is moving forward as well 🙂

"Is there an opportunity to expand your skills and experience?" – wow, so many things I learned, and as far as I see will do in the future as well: whether it's about designing database engines and schedulers, language design or creating a new mashup technology – I'm always supported to try out the newest and greatest. And to fail early and often if I'm on a bad track 🙂

"Does it meet most needs?" – fits my lifestyle, supports family; what else would I long for?

"Imagine working for the company" – before I joined my employer, I could hardly imagine myself working there. It wasn't the dress code, the culture or anything specific. It was the lack of knowledge on what is there. So next time someone wants to introduce you her/his company, listen!

Let's take today's entry being pushed back due to snow – I was to write about interview experience, but an unexpected amount of shoveling just popped in…

By the same customer care specialist I was asked to come up with a short list on what I'd like to the project manager to know for me to be happy to outsource. Here is the short list:

• Be able to understand my blog 🙂 – it's mostly written in 'business analyst' language
• I don't expect him/her to plan the architecture‏ – but still he/she should be able to understand it to a given level‏, especially if it's the architecture his/her company suggest
• Understanding of tiers (1, 2, 3, N, etc)
• Understanding of Service Oriented Architecture
• Understanding of the differences between web and desktop, mobile and desktop, hybrid and native
• If this is about database as well, understand what is a database, what is a star scheme, what is a cube, what is an rdbms, an olap, a nosql
• Understanding what is S+S, PaaS, IaaS, SaaS
• Understanding what is UX, where it has it's place
• Understanding what is model driven, what is test driven, what is business driven architecture
• Understanding what is a value chain, what place an ISV or a VAR has in that
• Understanding what is a user, a developer, a programmer, a power user, etc

What else would you add?

Due to the amount of snow (an example on the right – this is the size of ice slabs I got from under the car) in the recent days I became another one of the remote workers; during which I started to think, whether the current setup of mine is actually suitable for longevitied remote working – and I can declare, it's far from being perfect, but can be made so reasonable quickly. Right now I'm using a Surface RT as my main device as part of a device evaluation, and its possibilities to get it connected to external keyboard, mouse, and display do fit my needs. So what are the missing points? One easy to miss is your seat – to let you ergonomically sit. Another one would be good internet connection – luckily I did not have any issues ever with my provider. Lastly, the comfortable noise level is something I need to invest into. Right now I'm using an old LifeChat device, which suits me most of the cases – save for when I'm doing phone calls. I'm now positively looking into investing into a physical IP phone with headset (hopefully either noise cancelling, wireless or both). What else you try to make your remote work life better? And yes, I'm familiar with the posts of probably one of the biggest remote work enthusiast.

Yesterday I submitted nearly a dozen projects for summer internship, covering a wide range of topics from UI mashups to infrastructure developments; and was thinking about what language should I use when describing the projects? A while ago I was chatting with a friend of mine working as a customer care specialist at a company that is basically focusing on outsourcing – he complained he does not understand my blog. Which made me wonder: what courses I'd suggest to take for someone who wants to be able to work in such environment – in 2014. Next to some basics like 'requirements analysis', 'solution architectures' what else would be on the ideal list (eg for someone you would be happy to outsource all of a sudden)?

While reading another wonderful piece from Scott Hanselman, it just came to me in a sudden – I it possible, that we still haven't arrived to the age of enterprise templates? What are (or better, were) enterprise templates?

As time evolves, patterns and frameworks also do evolve significantly. Some APIs, features tend to become less useful, less 'modern'. If you happen to work at an enterprise, these might be even put to an official list to avoid, even companies implement tools that either at checkin time or later on, automatically; or manually, using crucible or similar tool do hunt down these anti-APIs. Isn't there an easier way? More than a decade ago I've chosen the following as the title of my thesis: Enterprise Templates and Domain Specific Languages – Enabling Modification of Visual Studio.NET IDEs to Comply with Company Standards and to Enhance Developer Productivity (yes, title brevity wasn't an aim). So, what this was about? Visual Studio (and also Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc) easily allows creation of addons/plugins. One type of these addins is the ability to create a DSL – Domain Specific Language. In my thesis I showed a way with actual implementation on using DSL to recreate the normal development environment, language, base class libraries, etc. – minus those particular features you want to get rid of. You want to introduce a warning if someone uses UrlPathEncode? You want to get rid of the property EnableViewStateMac and default it to be true? All of these is easily possible with enterprise templates.

Why it did not got into the common knowledge? That's a rather good question. Have YOU ever heard of enterprise templates and the possibilities described above?

Another movie I found is from the renowed UX expert, Chad Hower, who is speaking about Kudzu and WooHoo:

Part II of Eugenio Pace's "Anatomy of S+S – Considerations for Building, Running & Consuming S+S Applications", where he continous to speak about building multi-tenant architectures.

In the next few days, I'm going to repost some of the old videos I found why cleaning; let's start with Eugenio Pace's "Anatomy of S+S – Considerations for Building, Running & Consuming S+S Applications", where he speaks about building multi-tenant architectures.

A Purchase Order is a complex object which represents data stored in multiple, sometimes diverse, loosely coupled tables (sometimes these are even not rectangular today). Such complex graph of objects must be persisted in and out of the data base as a unit (not only speaking transactions, but also composition and association). Developers are tend to be more productive when working with the complete object, using a full or a subset of operations, depending on the abstraction level of the underlying framework. Complex object graphs like sales or purchase orders (having 100+ logical and physical tables) are very common in business applications (looking at sap again, probably). The operations running on them support a compensation model – as today's rich user interfaces often interact with multiple services in a given, predefined conversational fashion. As we all expect, these services may not all be read only –and even could be much more complex than crud. For example, each line item in a complex object graph actually calls a service to allocate inventory. As modification to these complex graphs needs to be still acid, these allocations must be rolled back if the user cancels (see reversible operations), or confirmed and persisted if saved. For this to naturally work, the operations should have built-in support for compensation, e.g service oriented transactions. The fact that these operations are reversible and cancellable (e.g restartable) provide guaranteed "forward only" execution (and server side scalability), the integrity is ensured by restarting execution until completed. Moreover, many batch oriented tasks are simply far too large to write compensation logic at once, yet need multiple service, logical (and usually in the end, database) transactions. Of course, in our multi-tenant world, the actions executed support multiple services in a flexible, pluggable model (see dependency injection and service discovery, but no uddi) – some application logic is regularly changed for every customer of the upcoming application (e.g. taxation, commissions); or multiple algorithms are known ahead of time but are applied based on context. And one of the hype topics – BI. BI is desired when the user is working (information at the fingertip), not just when they are actually analyzing information. IMHO, to be usable for the business, BI model has to derive from the original data model, and not the application entity model – this is a mistake easy to make.