This is what non-technical recruitment idiots will do when they need a “Web Developer” to handle enhancements and maintenance to corporate ASP.Net based systems:

1. Place advertisements packed with buzzwords that they don’t even understand. If you are in the market for a technical role and you find these ads packed with fluff such as “we need to elevate our technical synergies in a corporate sense” etc - beware! Most likely a senior person that has bubbled their way up to that role after a very large number of years working in the same place, rather than because they actually know anything real.
2. Some existing technical employee told them that the systems they have are in ASP.Net, so that’s the only word the recruitment idiot needs to know. They run a selection process and the person who includes the term “ASP.Net” in their CV, selection criteria (If a government position) and in the interview will most certainly score the position. This is because the recruitment idiot doesn’t know what “ASP.Net” even is, so it comforts them if they get someone who can handle that territory for them.

Oh no - what a disaster.

I recently ran a couple of selection panels for web developers, who would primarily be developing in ASP.Net and this is what I did:

1. Took “ASP.Net” as simply one possible language that an all-rounder would be able to quickly understand and use to develop web applications, just like any other platform.
2. Was very pedantic probing applicants in areas of leadership and teamwork. These are critical. Existing staff are always going to leave, you want future leaders in absolutely any role. You need people who will get on with everyone in the team. You can teach an intelligent monkey how to cut out the same old code in ASP.Net.
3. Looked for a technical all-rounder. It was far more important to me to find someone who knew fluent XHTML, CSS, a bit of PHP, a bit of SQL, competent in Java, some Cold Fusion for instance, rather than someone who has memorised ASP.Net since the beta release date. Honestly, you just don’t want one of these narrow 1 language people. I’m sure they are gurus in their area, but in any role, people are going to come across integration challenges and need to have all kinds of open views to be able to be the most flexible developer they can be.
4. Took the written side of applications very seriously. If you can’t string a sentence together without proper grammar, how can you be expected to be organised in any role or especially push out structured, logical code as a developer? A lot of public servants have an attitude of “Oh well, I’m sure they were busy, its just a mistake - let’s still interview them”. Rubbish - Not if I’m part of the interview panel, and definately not when I’m chairing the panel. You just can’t throw money at people who don’t deserve it. Its survival of the fittest and Canberra suffers too much from providing extra handouts to the non-deserving. The sad reality is that a lot of internal handouts are dished out between those who have soft spots for the lazy. But again, not when I’m involved on the panel.

The result: Well I got a real open-minded, highly capable developer. A strong all rounder who would look people in the face, work reliably, politely, and had a very open approach to development and things in general. Someone who I knew was much better than existing staff who had memorised “ASP.Net” simply because they’d been doing it for a while.

This particular developer knew a handful of approx 5 different langauges, but needed to gain experience specifically with ASP.Net. But you have to look at that as no big deal at all. I mean that is nothing. The guy has obviously proven he can program in most other languages, so why couldn’t he spend a few weeks making links from the ones he knows over to yet another language named “ASP.Net”. Much more important than that is having a personality, being driven, reliable, a team worker and a potential future leader etc. Right - makes sense to me too.

Anyway, I apply for money to send this guy on an ASP.Net course, and actually 2 separate courses get approved - great. Not cheap by any means, but dangle the total cost along side the guy’s salary and you’re not increasing the whole picture by much at all. Its a deadset investment. You’re forking out some money from the government slush funds to actually put it to a really smart use. A future investment of getting someone already smart, to be specifically tweaked for the environment he will be working in. Kind of a kick start making the jump across languages quicker, and time allows for productivity.

In this particular example, I left the particular organisation, and in a way, this particular employee was under my wing - really fitting in with how I saw the area expanding and evolving. A short while later there was pressure from above about spending this couple of thousand dollars on the above mentioned course. That bottled up into an attitude of “Why do we have employees that don’t know exactly “languageX version 1.298457458459″ (i.e. ASP.Net). Which then bottled up into pressure towards the particular developer, specifically dragging him into a room and probing him about why he doesn’t know ASP.Net fluently backwards in the first month or two, which I would have normally absorbed and responded to as his manager, eliminating any unnecessary panic. Not long after, the developer feels like he doesn’t need to fight an uphill battle coming to work every single day and voluntarily resigns.

What an utter waste of Government money, but mostly, what a wasted opportunity of having a really decent all rounder generalist type technical person who would have been key in helping an area grow. Instead, the recruitment idiots want someone who can walk in today and has memorised “ASP.Net”. Oh well, there are plenty of one-language monkeys around - go get ‘em.

I end this post with a plea begging all you intelligent and common-sensed readers to come down and help Canberra out. There is no shortage of money down here, Canberra is the roots of where every federal budget is spent - to keep the Country’s administration ticking over. Come and do a good job in your chosen role and take pride in it. You will earn decent money and push the idiots out of these roles that they inhabit, usually because they have trickled up into those positions after 25 years of achieving nothing.

I would like to welcome Paul Budde’s new blog site to the internet.

For a very long time, Paul has been effectively “blogging” about the Telecommunications industry via his main web site - long before the term “blogging” had surfaced. The only real difference being the format and technology the content was delivered via. BuddeComm always had a section containing Paul’s latest thoughts and analysis known as “From Paul’s Desk”. From Paul’s Desk was simply a static HTML page generated nightly by a custom automated tool, which later archived older posts into PDF format - made available for download. But underneath, it was always essentially a blog with blogger style content.

From Paul’s Desk was quite effective early on and attracted a lot of regular readers. However, in more recent times, the limitations and rigidity of the simple “From Paul’s Desk” system were beginning to place a burden around the sought-after content.

Wordpress was ideal for meeting the changing needs of Paul’s blog as it is so easy to use for non-technical content editors, while also being highly configurable with a plethora of plugins available. So I developed BuddeBlog as a customised version of Wordpress with some modern CSS-based round cornered navigation tabs - they scale perfectly when you play with CTRL mouse-scroll-wheel.

Previously, I announced the launch of Niki Scevak’s www.homethinking.com site.

I have been keeping an eye on the site’s progress and how quickly it has been gaining ground in the major search engines including Google. In terms of the URL showing up in general search engine results, it has been a pretty standard gradual growth - mostly due to bloggers and respected sites writing about the launch. However, one thing has really impressed me about the way the site has been structured underneath. And its such a simple thing.

The site contains masses of content, but its all mostly either centered around a couple of main entities:

1. Real Estate Agent
2. City, Town etc.

I noticed quite early on, that even though the site’s home page was still not registering a pagerank value, that certain key topic pages within the site had very quickly rocketed to respectable 5/10 pagerank values. These were pages such as San Francisco and Leslie Pappas. I.e. a whole page about a massive city, or a page dedicated to a particular professional working in the industry.

The beauty of this type of information architecture, is that you are creating really valuable pages that people will just love to link to. If Leslie Pappas was receiving great reviews, he would be proud to link to his own dedicated page on homethinking. Likewise, any number of web sites in the San Francisco area might find it valuable to link directly to a page purely devoted to summarising real estate agent performance in the San Francisco area. And this is exactly what has happened.

You get your fair share of people saying “Hey check out homethinking.com”, however people are far more interested in the content, if it is in some way directly relevant to them. The physical URLs of these target pages show the simple heirarchy being employed.

This kind of thinking is a very important step when setting up any kind of new web service. If you were to overlook this and for example simply provide a search tool that always supplied dynamic results and didn’t divulge a tidy, permanent URL for people to pass around, then you are probably missing out on a huge kickstart to your site’s pagerank - and that’s traffic and exposure.

If you run a site and people are linking a lot more to the structured pages within rather than the home page itself, its a sign that you have a good, practical content base.

I am pleased to say that I will be providing services to ActewAGL for the next 12 months, commencing Monday.

In short, ActewAGL is basically the ACT’s core supplier of utilities, owned by a joint venture between Government owned ACTEW Corporation and AGL. Also incorporated is TransACT, a leading provider of telecommunications infrastructure and services within the ACT, i.e. optical fibre connections to ACT residents.

I will be working on a mix of projects for any of the various sections within ActewAGL (water, electricity, gas, TransACT etc). Initially, I will be focusing on something to do with managing the TransACT fibre to the node connections.

It always used to be about the web developer. The hardcore coder with a technical background who could apply those skills to coding up any clever web site backend and getting things to work - wow what a guy. That is still such a highly respectable skillset for someone who is really really good at that job. But also, I really feel that now is the time of the modern web integrator.

This is someone who has the server-side or nerd background capable of coding up a storm, but who has the foresight to not jump straight in and use it wastefully. I mean why would you code up a mini content management system, when you can simply bang out a copy of wordpress for a client and it does everything and more for a basic content-driven site - everyone wins. The site owner can ever-so-simply publish new and maintain existing content without needing to know HTML, you as the creator gets off with less upfront development time and that’s also passed on via reduced costs to the customer.

The web integrator also has the ability to knock up some reasonable graphics files in a range of formats using any of the main programs. They are a mix between a web-specific graphic artist, nerd coder, general logical thinker and people person. They also understand hosting, security and any other internet related issues.

This kind of web integrator can be smart at their job and for the most common web development tasks thesedays select existing off-the-shelf systems to plugin to suit the customers’ needs. Again, take wordpress as an example. When some new buzzword technology comes out like the next RSS, you just go grab the Wordpress plugin for it. You aren’t coding anything yourself, you’re just integrating. If you had’ve coded up the main site from scratch, you wouldn’t be downloading any nifty plugins - you would be Neville stand-alone.

Really, I know your coding skills are just top knotch, but your time is so much more well spent “integrating” rather than re-inventing the wheel like some big gun developer. Its been the same case with any form of software development for a very long time. You won’t make money unless you are re-using existing stuff. Otherwise, no customer is willing to pay for the time spent, and actually, its the dumb way of doing things. Of course there are always the exceptions, such as coding up a custom radar system for the Australian Navy - however on the web, we’re all basically just publishing information and collecting input aren’t we..?

Its getting to the point where if you were some kid applying for a web developer role, its becoming better to say “Hey, I know 20 freely available web systems that I can easily integrate and customise with minimal effort because of my coding skills in a couple of languages” rather than saying “Hey I know ASP absolutely backwards and can code anything in it”.

Time better spent.