So, I’m building a website. It’s a tool for programmers, which I think is pretty useful. Is it a “startup”? I don’t know. I don’t even really know if it’s a good idea yet. The way I work probably isn’t the way others work so who knows if anybody else will find this thing useful. Programmers are very picky about tools, and rightly so. When talking about my somewhat expensive keyboard I bought for myself to have at work, I said “Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” which is of course a famous quote but also fits how I feel about tools. Programmers need guns. Metaphorically.

But anyway, I don’t know if it’s a startup. It’s an idea. It’s an experiment. I would love more than anything for this thing to take off so I can hire some of my friends to come work with me. I would love it if this experiment took off enough just to support me working on it. But right now I’m not really interested in the typical TechCrunch / VC / Valley / Bubble / blahblah startup. I’m building this thing myself since I’m doing it for no money. I’m going to bootstrap it, which is startup-speak for actually making money like a real business. At some point if it makes sense to let somebody give me money, I’ll consider it of course. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and all that. Money isn’t evil, it’s a tool.

I think it’s a shame we’ve lost some of the “2 people in a garage” excitement from the early 2000s. Yeah, there’s a lot to making a modern website. So what? That’s part of being a programmer, learning new stuff. That’s part of why I call this thing an experiment, if it was a business I wouldn’t be able to play around as much. I’m learning about Heroku instead of using a server which is something I already know how to do. I’m using Grails and Groovy instead of Java which I already know. I’m using Mongodb instead of Mysql which, you guessed it, I already know. Even stuff like wildcard ssl certificates is new to me since they didn’t used to have those when I was an admin. Is some of this new stuff going to bite me in the ass since I don’t know it? Probably. But I’ll do what I’ve always done which is learn on the job. And in the end I’ll have built something cool, learned a ton of new stuff, and had fun. And maybe made some money.

We’ll see where this thing goes. More later.

My Minecraft Home Base

This is the first of hopefully many videos I’m going to make about my adventures in the land of Minecraft. I hope you enjoy, it’s my first time making any videos like this.

hehe

A great (and short) video from a great coder about selling software to women. While the talk is about women, really the larger ideas are about anyone.

I’ve been thinking about these sorts of ideas for awhile and I’ll have a post on it soon.

Merlin Mann – Scared Shitless – Webstock 2011

Sheesh, pretty much everything Merlin does blows me away in some way or another. Even without hearing the talk that goes along with these slides he succeeds in moving me in a very real way that few other writers do. You should listen to his podcast, follow his blog, and keep up with his tweets (which are more of an acquired taste but once you get on his wavelength frequently inspire me and/or make me laugh out loud (for real, not in a LOL sense)).

I’ve been working a side project that involves a REST web service. I needed to upload a file along with some identifying data and for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. I could get files to upload with a PUT or send the data with a POST, but couldn’t do both in one call. I finally got it and I want to keep it here since finding full examples for CXF stuff isn’t easy.

First, here’s the interface for the method:

@POST
@Path("/stuff")
@Produces("application/json")
@Consumes(MediaType.MULTIPART_FORM_DATA)
public String doStuff(@Multipart("id")Integer id, @Multipart("data")String foo, @Multipart("image")byte[] image);

The @Consumes annotation with the @Multipart annotations on the parameters is the vital bit. These allows you to just grab the parameters in the implementation and not mess around with getting the Multipart Attachments and all that.

@Override
public String doStuff(Integer id, String foo, byte[] image) {
}

I’m sending the file with Android, using the HttpClient api.

HttpPost request = new HttpPost(url);
 
MultipartEntity mentity = new MultipartEntity(HttpMultipartMode.BROWSER_COMPATIBLE);
ByteArrayBody imgBody = new ByteArrayBody(imageBytes, "image/jpeg", "image");
mentity.addPart("image", imgBody);
 
//add headers
for(NameValuePair h : headers)
{
    request.addHeader(h.getName(), h.getValue());
}
 
for(NameValuePair p : params) {
    mentity.addPart(p.getName(), new StringBody(p.getValue(), "text/plain", Charset.forName( "UTF-8" )));
}
 
request.setEntity(mentity);
 
executeRequest(request, url);

This is nice and simple, and it works fine for me. Hopefully this will be helpful to you too if you’re like me and Google this issue a hundred times. :)

When I finally decided to look for another job, I aimed high. My brother-in-law put my resume in for Google, even though without a degree I figured I’d never get in there. I did it mostly for the interviewing experience, which is a very good thing to do. Interviews (phone or in-person) are tough and the more experience you have, the more relaxed you’ll be. I put my resume in to LinkedIn, Yahoo, Netflix, Zynga, Salesforce; a bunch of places I knew had strong engineering groups where they use Java and where I would learn a lot. Not having a degree hurt more than I thought it would. I thought in 2010 we were past everybody having to have a degree but I didn’t even get a call back from a lot of places, even with a number of years of experience. I ended up having phone interviews with a couple of places and moved on to 2nd level interviews with 1 or 2 I think.

My main problem I think was lack of breadth of experience. I have 10+ years programming, mostly in Perl. I’ve spent the last 3 or 4 years doing Java but at an insurance company doing internal applications and integration work. Most of it is various flavors of “Take data from System X or File Y, put the data in System A or write it to File B”. It’s been fun and I’ve certainly learned a lot, but not about a ton of different things. A lot of people wanted specific experience with Spring or Hibernate or whatnot and learning on the job doesn’t really fit the bill. Learning on the job is mostly how I’ve learned and while I think I’ve been very successful doing that, it does leave gaps in your knowledge where you haven’t had to use some specific technology and it does take time. I set out to fill in the gaps as much as I could, going through videos on algorithms from ArsDigita University (highly recommended) to reading more books. But in the end, I knew I just wasn’t up to the Senior level most companies seem to be looking for. That’s another question I had, how can companies only hire senior people? Don’t most places need or want people at the middle level? People who can get the job done but just don’t have the experience aren’t given much opportunity at big tech companies it seems.

During the early stages of my search, I had applied to a company in San Diego called Awarepoint who were doing very cool things with wireless networks and Java. I grew up in San Diego so this seemed perfect. When I actually got my resume together for them, the position was closed. I was disappointed for sure. A few months went by and I looked through a Who’s Hiring? post on Hacker News where people just posted positions they were looking to fill. I searched for Java and lo-and-behold there was a post by Awarepoint! I was prepared this time and sent my resume immediately. The poster was a member of the engineering team. We talked on the phone and he set me up with more phone interviews with various people. A little while later, they actually flew me out to San Diego for a day of in-person interviews. This would be a pretty big move so I interviewed them as much as they did me. I got a really great feeling from the team and pretty much knew this would be a great fit for me. They were looking for a mid-level person and with my limited experience, I know I’m a strong mid-level guy at this point. Being honest with myself about that really helped me understand that I wasn’t going to get some of those Senior positions and take some of the sting out of those rejections.

I knew I wanted to work there and I got the feeling they wanted me to come on board. I got very excited about the possibility of moving back to San Diego and working for this great company. For various reasons, my position in limbo where they kept saying they wanted to hire me but couldn’t actually make it happen lasted awhile. I knew I’d be moving if they made an offer but couldn’t tell my current boss in case it didn’t go through. This was a pretty stressful time. I got further word from Awarepoint that they wouldn’t be able to give me a firm answer for maybe a couple of months. I felt strongly enough about them that I was fine with waiting. Plus I was supposed to be running a huge project at the current job and felt better about getting that going before leaving since I was given the chance.

In the end, they were able to make me an offer after a month or so and I accepted immediately. I’m incredibly excited to be able to join such a great company (they were just named #1 Best Place To Work in Healthcare) who is doing really cutting edge stuff. The product also makes a real difference in hospitals and could very easily save lives, literally.

So in the end, the road to this job included the Java Posse Roundup where I first started thinking about a new job, the Hacker News community, this blog, and my writing on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com (which I got because of this blog and Twitter).

I haven’t been writing here for awhile because the stuff I wanted to write about was my job hunting experiences but while I still had my old job I couldn’t exactly do that. Now that I’m moving on, I’ll be writing more.

With the coming of the iPad, the digital comics world has blown up. Once upon a time comics were sold at the newsstands but switched to comic book shops selling only comics. That transition is probably about to happen again with downloadable comics. There will always be physical comics and graphic novels are here to stay, but most people will buy digital. It’s happened with music and it’s probably going to happen to books.

The question for me is, how do I feel about that? I’m not sure. I love books. I’ve been a reader since I can remember. Buying books is a special event for me. Last year I spent a couple of hours in the local bookstore Page 1 with a bunch of store credit and ended up spending $180 on brand new books. It was one of my favorite experiences of the year. I have multiple bookshelves all over my house and can barely fit all my unread books on one six-foot shelf. I’ve bought books I already had just for the cover. But a few weeks ago I bought a Kindle, the new version 3 one. And I love the hell out of that little thing. I’m reading Jonathan Franzen’s new book Freedom which I had originally pre-ordered in hardcover but cancelled and bought on the Kindle (saving a few dollars in the process). It’s unbelievable how much easier it is to carry around the 1/4 inch thick Kindle than it would be to carry a 500 page book. There’s a couple of books I’ve been wanting to read that I’ve been avoiding due to their sheer bulk. Not having to take into account the physical object means I can focus on the reading, which is what I really love. Now that I have the option, I’ll still some books if I want the physical object for what it is. But that’s what the paper is now, an option, not a requirement of the reading experience.

After a lifetime as a book nerd, I’m learning to love books without having to love the paper.

At the 2010 Roundup, I was once again faced with seeing people doing things with their career that I want to do. I want to be learning and growing as a programmer the way a lot of Roundup attendees are. I decided that once again I would reevaluate my job and try to figure out what the best thing would be. The difference is, this time I want to figure out what to do not to escape a bad situation but to go towards something good. I haven’t decided what to do yet but I have refocused my efforts toward learning and getting better rather than just sitting comfortably.

I’ve always learned on the job and I’ve found I’m very good at that. The problem with that kind of learning is it tends to leave gaps in your knowledge since you don’t learn as much that you don’t need right then. I’m rectifying that with a renewed course of study in the areas I feel I’m missing. I’m also focusing on the quality of the work I do and the code I write even more. I don’t work for a software company so I’m a little limited in the efforts I can put forth here but now that our boss has decided we’re to run our own projects I’m definitely pushing more quality into my work and I’m prouder than I’ve ever been with my code.

Like I say, I haven’t decided exactly what to do so this blog post doesn’t have some big conclusion. My new focus is a big deal to me though so I wanted to write it here and not forget. More to come!