Raible Designs

Want a kick-ass Java/UI Engineering Job in Mountain View?

The last month working at LinkedIn has been an absolute blast. I'm new to the whole "treating developers like royalty" thing, so that's taken a while to get used to. It's definitely nice, especially when the company gives you ownership of the things you're working on. Sure, there's schedules and priorities, but it seems like each and every engineer has control of their own destiny. As a consultant, I've been very impressed with the way I've been embraced and folded into the team like a regular employee. There's lots of team lunches, a tech meetup every now and then, and I even played hoops with a bunch of guys last night. This is probably the coolest company I've ever worked for.

Wanna have fun like I am? LinkedIn is looking to hire quite aggressively over the next several months. There's new faces almost every week and hopefully I can "hook you up" to be a part of the festivities. Below is a position that we're currently hiring for in the UI Engineering team. Working remotely is not an option at this time, you need to live in (or relocate to) the Bay Area.

I don't know if JSF and Facelets experience is still a requirement (now that I'm here ), but a passion for UI frameworks and web development is. You should know at least two leading Java frameworks and have a lot of experiencing with testing web applications out-of-container. We're not looking for Java Developers turned web developers, we're more looking for Web Developers that know Java.

If this sounds interesting to you, shoot me your resume in an e-mail. Don't forget to include a link to your LinkedIn Profile.

AppFuse 2.0 Status Update

It's been far too long since the release of AppFuse 2.0 M5. When we released that version, I fully expected to finish up RC1 a week or two later, and follow that with 2.0 Final a week later. Fast forward a month and a half, and there's still 38 issues left for 2.0 RC1. What happened?

Life got in the way.

There's probably less than 40 hours left to complete 2.0. I could say that I haven't had the time, but you all know that's a lie. Everyone has time. When someone says "I don't have time to do X right now", this really means "that's not on my priority list and I'm not going to make time to do it". So unfortunately AppFuse hasn't been on my priority list. Finding a new gig, vacationing with my family and buying a new mountain bike were on my priority list.

So if there's only 40 hours worth of work left, why didn't I just work a couple hours a day on it? Primarily because when I work on AppFuse it possesses me. I tend to get caught up in it and it's tough for me to concentrate on other things, especially work that I'm supposed to be doing during the day. Since I've had two new clients in the past few weeks, I've been aware of this and purposely stayed away from working on it.

The good news is things should settle down soon. I have a couple weekends on the horizon that look to be free, so hopefully I can crank it out and finish it up in the next month or so. As far as the project itself, there's plenty of users happily using the 2.0 milestone releases and there's still lots of traffic on the mailing list. It's crazy to think that the planning for AppFuse 2.0 started over a year ago and development started one year ago next month. If I knew it'd take this long, would I still have done it? Absolutely. I've never heard so many positive comments from users.

In other AppFuse News, Contegix has graciously donated an entire managed server to the project. We have licenses for the Atlassian Suite (JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo and Crowd) and will be moving/installing everything over the next week or so.

Thanks Contegix!

As anyone that uses them knows, they're simply the best hosting company in existence today. Their customer support and response time is incredible.

First Day at LinkedIn

Today was my first day onsite at LinkedIn in Mountain View, California. I'm very impressed by two things so far: they gave me a new MacBook Pro and Sushi is on tap for lunch tomorrow. Of course, there's a lot more impressive things going on there, but the new MacBook was today's highlight. The strange thing is I don't need one - I just got a new 17" a few months ago. Nevertheless, I received and configured a new 15" today. It's not the machine that impresses me, but the company's willingness to buy the best machines for its developers.

I was introduced to almost the entire company this morning, and I only saw one Windows machine in a sea of Macs. My favorite quote? "If the MacBook Pro isn't fast enough for you, we can see about getting you a Mac Pro." I like a company that knows what developers like and doesn't have a problem treating them well.

The last time I received a new computer as part of a contract or full-time position? I believe that was way back in 2002. Working at LinkedIn seems like a developer's paradise. Does your company provide new MacBook Pros and Cinema Displays to its developers?

Want a kick-ass Java Job in Boulder?

Do you know AppFuse well? Want a job in Boulder, Colorado?

I met with a couple of guys from Morphlix last week - they're using AppFuse as a base for building a new video distribution system - like Netflix, only a lot better. They're building up their team and looking for ace back-end and UI developers. If you're interested, drop them a line via [email protected].

Why do I mention this here? Because it sounds like an awesome company to work for. They're in startup mode and, from the sounds of their business plan - destined for success. Who knows, I may even join them after I get done with the LinkedIn gig.

Summer Gigs

I'm happy to report that after posting The good ol' Job Hunt last week, I had a prosperous week searching for my next gig. I got an offer from a local company in Denver on Tuesday and had 5 interviews on Thursday with various companies. I ended up accepting an offer from LinkedIn for a 3-month contract that starts in a few weeks (thanks for the hookup Brian!).

I also landed a 2-week contract that'll keep me occupied through the end of June. There's a nice week between the two gigs where we're heading to The Cabin for the 4th. I'm currently working on getting an "anchor desk" at the Hive Coorperative, but unfortunately won't be able to use it much in July. I'll be in Mountain View the first couple weeks, followed by Portland (for OSCON) at the end of the month.

Anyone out there interested in a tech meetup in Mountain View in July? My birthday is the 16th - maybe we could meet up around then?

Update: My first day at LinkedIn rocked.

The good ol' Job Hunt

My Boston gig ended last week and I'm currently enjoying a week off with the kids at my parents' place in Oregon. While I have a few opportunities, I can't help but think there's got to be a better system for connecting developers to contracts. While I'm open to full-time work, I've found that contracts suite me better because of all the conferences I attend and time I take off.

In Denver, there's quite a few gigs available, but they all seem to have the same two problems: 1) no rate is published and 2) you have to go through a recruiter to get them. Recruiters aren't bad people, and I don't mind dealing with them. However, they do tend to take 20% off the top. Most of the recruiters I've worked with in the past are responsible for one thing - the initial introduction. After that, they tend to disappear and you never see them again. However, you're constantly reminded they're there when you realize they're taking 20% of your wages. With a recruiter involved, the rates in Denver are OK, but lower than expected. Without a recruiter, the rates are pretty good.

The best solution I've found to the getting rid of the recruiter-middle-man problem is this blog and networking. When someone contacts me directly for a contract, it's usually easier to negotiate a rate that makes both parties happy. However, most of these contacts come from out of state, so then there's the travel and working-from-home problems. I think I can solve the work-from-home problem by joining something like the Hive Cooperative. As for traveling, I'd rather work in Denver but I'm willing to travel to select cities: namely Boston, NYC and Portland (Oregon). Why those cities? Because I have friends and/or family that live there.

As I'm out here in Oregon this week, I've realized that working in Portland would likely be the most enjoyable for me to travel to. My parents live close by, it's a kick-ass city and it's especially enjoyable during the summer. However, I'm faced with the same problem: how do I connect with folks looking for good help without going through recruiters? According to Dice.com, Portland has a lot of interesting gigs, but they're (once again), all listed by recruiting companies. Does anyone know of a service that connects employers directly with consultants? Or, even better, is anyone out there in Denver or Portland that's looking to hire someone with my skills?

Ant vs. Maven

I found a good post from Steve Loughran on what's wrong with Maven's repositories. I agree with most of his points, but would like to point out mvnrepository.com. This site seems to provide good XML Feeds for what's been uploaded to Maven's Central Repository. If you're using Maven, you should probably subscribe to its Atom Feed.

In related news, Timothy M. O'Brien has an entry about Steve's upcoming book: Ant in Action. This book is the 2nd edition of Java Development with Ant. I have a hard time believing Erik Hatcher is helping Steve write Ant in Action - AFAIK, he's off in Rails-land enjoying himself. Regardless, I'm sure Ant in Action will be an excellent book. Java Development with Ant is one of my favorite technical books of all time and is largely responsible for inspiring me to write AppFuse. I read JDwA way back in October 2002 and used a lot of its code to develop AppFuse 1.x's Ant-based build system.

Like Tim, I still like Ant. However, AppFuse 2.x uses Maven 2 and most of the projects I work on these days use Maven 2. It may surprise some folks, but I actually like Maven 2 (not Maven 1). Sure it has issues, but after a year of using it in anger, I know how to solve most of its quirks. AppFuse 2.x users will benefit from this greatly and I'm thinking of changing its tagline to "We make Maven work."

One of the most interesting things about moving to Maven is we were easily able to make AppFuse more like a framework than a project starter kit. We thought this is what most folks wanted - especially the ability to upgrade a project to the latest version of AppFuse. While some folks wanted this, it seems like most folks liked the full-source version that was a pain-in-the-ass to upgrade. I don't blame them. On the project I'm on, I'll likely be converting to a full-source version before the project is over. That's why APF-675 exists. I doubt we'll make it happen for the 2.0 final release, but it is on our radar of things to do shortly after. With any luck, we'll create a way to migrate projects using embedded AppFuse to full-source AppFuse.

I'd also like to point out something ironic. With AppFuse 1.x, there were a lot of folks that advocated we move to Maven. Their primary reasoning - the Ant build scripts were too long and complicated. How about a good ol' lines of XML comparison for those folks:

• Lines of Ant-related XML in AppFuse 1.x: 1655
• Lines of Maven-related XML in AppFuse 2.x: 2847

Oh wait, that's not a fair comparison. The above number is for AppFuse in SVN, which end users won't deal with. A new project created with AppFuse 2.x will likely have a pom.xml with 634 lines. That's about 1/3 of the amount needed for Ant in AppFuse 1.x. Maven hasn't exactly gotten us away from XML hell though. How about a LOC count for archetypes vs. installers:

• Lines of Ant-related XML for AppFuse 1.x framework installers: 2786
• Lines of Maven-related XML for AppFuse 2.x archetypes (including archetype's pom.xml files): Too much to count. Creating archetypes is waayyyy too complicated IMO. Basic archetypes seem to be around 740 lines (pom.xml for archetype project, archetype.xml and archetype's pom.xml), modular archetypes are around 870. 740 x 4 + 870 x 4 = 6440. I'm guessing the full-source archetypes will add another 5000 lines of XML. Ugh.

This XML-for-archetypes comparison might be unfair as well. With 1.x, you could only create a webapp, with 2.x, you can create a modular application and chop off the web-portion if you so choose.

Of course, the real benefits of moving to Maven are elsewhere. We've seen quite an uptick on the mailing list in the last few months. There's tools cropping up and I've gotten quite a few inquiries about training (yes, I do have a 3-day course on Spring, Hibernate, Ajax, Maven and AppFuse). To me, AppFuse 2.x seems more complicated than 1.x, but it seems the community thinks otherwise. Judging from the increased amount of developer activity on the project, developers seem more interested in a Maven-based system too. Then again, we are making Maven work!

[TSE] Rapid Web Application Development with Rob Harrop

There's a couple of other sessions I should probably go to, namely Juergen's talk on Transactions and Mark Fisher's Message Driven POJOs Rock! However, transactions is generally a pretty boring topic and I don't see myself developing any MDPs in the next two weeks. If you don't use your knowledge in two weeks, you generally lose it, so I'll wait to learn more about MDPs until someone pays me to. I know a fair bit already, so I don't know that there's a whole lot more to learn.

I'm attending Rob Harrop's Rapid Web Application Development Essentials talk. With any luck, I'll learn some new tips that we can use in AppFuse.[Read More]