Month: May 2008

As far as a 2 week trip can be called a lightning blitz, that’s exactly what I have been doing in the past two weeks. London, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Stuttgart, Rome, Tuscany, and then unwinding back. If I stayed longer than one day in one place, it was an utter surprise!

But then, I managed to see all my family, and I am really happy that I did. First time with my younger brother’s two sons, and reconnecting with my older brother’s daughter and son, who are now becoming wonderful humans – all of them. Visited father, aunt, everybody, and still managed to get to the beach for some "sightseeing".

Summing it all up: not being able to get to Italy for the last seven years was certainly a punishment! 

One thing I noticed in interviews recently is the shift in focus for the candidates. It's been a while now that tech has shown itself resilient to the overall downturn in the economy, so we have been living in and with a candidate market (vs. employer market). One of the many reasons cited by people to turn you down is simply lack of technological fit. In particular, people are really fond of their infrastructure.

If you have a Ruby on Rails person in front of you, it's like the good old days when you had to talk to a Forth Dimension geek. Ruby is perfect, and Rails makes it sublime. PHP people are not happy with PHP alone any longer, now they swear by CakePHP or some other framework. Java folks won't even talk to you if you don't use JBoss.

All in all, this is a good development. There has been way too much investment in reinventing the wheel, and a rational approach that reuses concepts and code is of enormous value. At the same time, though, all the frameworks strike me as ill-concieved in some form. They work fine as long as it's five people using them, but they don't scale well at all.

(more…)