Unruly Rambling - stlouis tag

Speaking of Interviewing

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:52:58 GMT

I've had a req open for weeks now and can't find hardly anyone qualified for basic java web development. I guess I'm not alone. Is the job market in St. Louis that hot right now or did all the talent leave and go elsewhere. What gives?

Can you teach an old dog new tricks?

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 17:49:31 GMT

I sure hope so because I'm back in class pursuing an MBA at University of Missouri - St Louis. I attended my first class in Organizational Behavior last night. I am very intrigued by what the class brings to the table. Keeping moral up and leading an organization in a unified direction is what separates the great leaders from the bad ones. I've worked in many different environments and have strong opinions on what works and what does not. It remains to be seen if my ideas have any research to back them up. Regardless, this class will be an interesting stepping stone.

Gateway Software Symposium - Day 2

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:43:49 GMT

Cryptography for Programmers
By: Stuart Halloway
This talk focused on everything crypto and I would recommend that anyone not familiar with it attend this session. All and all this session was par for the course for Stuart. A fantastic presentation on good detailed content. Topics covered included hashes, secret key cryptography, public key cryptography and digital signatures. OpenSSL and Java Code were both used in examples. We also discussed how many products claim to have a 128 bit hash, or 256 bit encryption, or 64 bit block cipher, but the only number that really matters is the number of bits of security. This becomes basically the lowest common denominator of your security. In other words, your system is only as secure as it's weakest link. In a nutshell this talk was everything programmers should know about security.

Test First Development
By: Venkat Subramaniam
The best part of Venkat's presentation was that there was almost no presentation at all. What I mean is that when I went to grab copies of the slides, there were only two pages. This entire session was done within IDEA and coded based on user interaction. While I appreciated the energy put forth, I think I would have better spent my time elsewhere. I've presented these kinds of things in the past to groups at work. I kind of knew this ahead of time but there wasn't much else offered during this time-slot that caught my eye. I hope to catch a more advanced session by Venkat tomorrow. He is a really good speaker.

The Fallacies of Enterprise Systems(Architecture)
By: Ted Neward
Ted's talk covered the ten fallacies of distributed computing. Upon hitting each one, he shared personal experiences where he or his team may have fallen into this trap. He also encouraged group participation around the topics. All in all it was a good interactive session.

1) The network is reliable
2) Latency is zero
3) Bandwidth is infinite
4) The network is secure
5) Topology doesn't change
6) There is one administrator
7) Transport cost is zero
8) The network is homogeneous
9) The system is monolithic
10) The system is finished

Gateway Software Symposium - Day 1

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 14:01:21 GMT

As with every other year, I started off the event with a predetermined list of which sessions that I would attend. Only time will tell if this list will remain accurate. Typically I tend to stray off and see other sessions, spur of the moment.

Classloading in Java - Building Dynamic Systems Without Pain Sessions 1 & 2
By: Stuart Halloway
Part 1 of this presentation was the same one gave last year, but since there wasn't much else at this timeslot, I ended up repeating part 1. As always, Stuart's presentation was given with much energy and most importantly with IDEA on the screen half of the time. I'm not a big fan of the PowerPoint only presentations. Most of what was covered was above the virtual machine layer but below the application layer. The difference between explicit and implicit classloaders was expounded upon. The way certain applications like JUnit, ANT, and just about every application server violate the classloader delegation rule was discussed in depth. All in all it was a session all Java Programmers should see.

Ruby for Java Programmers
By: Dave Thomas
Since I've been interested in Ruby lately, I figured I'd give Dave Thomas's talk a shot. I'm glad I did and now I'm even more eager for the Ruby group to get productive. Dave was his usual entertaining self walking around in his socks and never running out of puns. In this talk, Dave covered some basic syntax that probably seemed bizarre to most people, I know it was the first time I came across it. Other things that were covered included, writing some code to pull web service data from Amazon to show book rankings. He had to mock up the Amazon web service since there was no internet connectivity. The final demonstration was storing this web service data into a mysql database using ActiveRecord.

Dinner was served around 6:30 and Dave Thomas's Keynote address followed. As with last year, there were not many food choices that were Lent aware, so I stuck with potatoes and bread. Oh well, no big deal. At Dave's keynote, the topic was the Art of Programming. Similarities between Art and Engineering were discussed. Concepts such as modularity were discussed in the context of writing software and how Michael Angelo painted the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Both are made attainable by a divide and conquer mentality of breaking large tasks into small sub tasks. Other trials and tribulations of his work experience were touched upon. Several funny situations were discussed that i could not do justice for here so I won't even try. All in all, the Keynote rocked!

St. Louis Ruby User Group

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:34:28 GMT

Last night was the official kick off of the St. Louis Ruby User Group. The kickoff meeting was held at Regatta Bar and Grill on Maryville Centre Drive where our small group had dinner with Pragmatic Dave Thomas. The focus of the last nights meeting was to come up with an approach or plan for the group. There were several ideas kicked around but nothing set in stone. Our group ranges from zero Ruby experience to fairly proficient. I'm one of the zero guys :)

Thanks to Curt Hibbs for making this happen and to Dave Holsclaw for assuming the organizer role to see that the rubber meets the road. I look forward to participating in this group.

Tour De Dad

Sun, 03 Oct 2004 23:22:36 GMT

On Saturday, I attended the SemiAnnual Tour De Dad bike ride. Actually bike ride is a bit strong, it was really a social event where bikes were used as the transportation means. This event was hosted by a friend's(Hans) father, John Gerwitz. Hans referred to this event as a "pub crawl on wheels". I'd have to agree. The focus of this social outing was to expose St Louis County dwellers to the jewel's of St Louis city. This particular gathering focused on Forest Park specifically. Having grown up in the city near Ted Drewes, I am very familiar with many of it's attractions including Forest Park. I had a great time, learned a bit of history about the park, and met some great people.