We finally got loaded and on the runway at 12:30pm the next day but we then got an announcement that a passenger on the plane didn’t have enough medicine to make the flight and the doctors felt it was a life threatening risk, so we had to roll back to the stand and have the passenger exit. This caused another hour delay while the passenger was deplaned. Due to this new delay we missed our 7:50am flight from Heathrow to Milan, and we had to take the 9:50am. Luckily we made that one and finally got into Milan around 1pm Monday afternoon. We were supposed to get in at 9pm Sunday evening. Joy.

Just to add salt to the wound, British Airways managed to lose Aaron’s luggage. Of course we had to wait for all the luggage to come out before we figured this out and then Aaron had to go report it missing. It ended up that it never made it out of Heathrow. Of course both Ashley (Aaron’s wife) and my luggage made it so how they only lost his is mind boggling. The “wait for the luggage” delay made us miss our train from Malpensa (airport) to Codorna (train station in Milan) and we had to wait another 40 minutes for the next train. At this point we just started laughing and sat back and got our first espresso from the airport bar.

We got to our hotel around 4pm and by that point we had no interest in exploring the city. We were hungry but all the restaurants are closed from about 3pm till 7:30pm or so. The typical meal structure for a Milanese is to go to a bar after work, grab a light snack and coffee and then eat dinner around 9pm. We were so exhausted by that time we just decided head over to the conference, register, get our passes, head back to the hotel to call it a night and get room service for dinner. There was no way I could make it past 7pm after a trip like that.

The next day, Aaron and I got up early, ate breakfast at the amazing breakfast buffet the hotel put on (seriously one of the best I have had) and then headed over for our first 9am session. The session went very well, it was standing room only (150+ people) and the audience was very receptive to what we had to say. Aaron was told by multiple people it was the best session they had had so far. By this point, we were totally tech/conference burnt out (North America MAX was intense) so we decided to bail on the conference till our next session at 2:45pm and meet up with Aaron’s wife Ashley. We caught the Metro down to the Duomo, scoped it our and then wandered the central part of town for a few hours. We got a nice lunch and found a fantastic street market that sold all kinds of goods and foods.

We then headed back for our 2:45 session which went over well, but as usual we had a bit of push back from a few designers (I still owe you all a full post on our session, more on this to come I promise!). Outside of some heated discussions with a few designers, the session went very well and we headed back out for more exploring and dinner. That night we met up with Ryan Stewart, Mark Anders, Jim Corbett, Doug Winnie, Ted Patrick and many many other Adobe employees (and fellow hangers-on) for the classic after sessions hotel bar drink-a-thon. We had some killer conversations and Enrique Duvos introduced us to the local drink, the Negroni. Its like a martini but they add Campari to give it some kick and flavor. Doug said it tasted like a combination of shag carpet and wheatgrass, but Aaron and I loved them. Thank you Enrique for showing us the way… next time you are in town we will take you to the Redwood room for Negronis on us.

The next morning we hit the Naviglio Grande Canals and then headed back to MAX to join Doug Winnie for his “Flex Project Workflows” session. Doug built his session around a project that we all worked on together. Aaron and I chimed in on points that we learned over the lifespan of the project and talked about how Flex Gumbo and Catalyst would change the way we operate in the future. After the session Doug was all done with his responsibilities for MAX and we all headed to the Brea district for dinner.

Doug headed back to the States the next morning and Aaron, Ashley and I headed off to a city tour that we had booked. We got to tour the Castello Sforzesco, we had a chance to see “The Last Supper” by Leonardo Da Vinci, we got a peek inside the Teatro alla Scala and we toured inside the Duomo. It was a great guided tour and I snapped a ton of pics of the city. We then grabbed some amazing pizza for lunch, walked the shopping district and drank Pina Coladas at Cova (I ordered Panna Cotta, the waiter heard Pina Colada, sigh). We headed back to the hotel for a nap and then went back to the Brea district for Indian food at the Curry House. We were kind of burnt out on Pizza and Pasta by that time.

Aaron and Ashley headed out the next morning to meet some friends in Switzerland (damn I am jealous) and Heidi Williams (of the Flex Builder team, and my old boss) and I happened to have the same flight so we headed off to the airport to go home. The flight home was uneventful (minus the cold) and I am back home trying to recover from jetlag. Nothing like getting up at 4am wide awake. I have posted a few choice pics from the trip that covers our time in Milan and MAX Europe and I can’t wait for our next adventure!

[ Photo gallery available in blog post. ]

So, where have I been all this time and why has this blog gotten so quiet? Well, first there was the session planning, then their is client work, oh and I am in the middle of starting a company with Aaron and moving all our clients to the new firm (more details to come), its also wedding season so I have been traveling around a lot for those and planning my own (well, Xina is really planning it I just help where I can). I am just a bit underwater and trying to take a few minutes to motivate me to write the blog has kind of been tough. Oh, and I just got Fable 2, Fallout 3 and LittleBigPlanet… there just isn’t enough time to do it all!

I will try to blog a bit more in the coming months, especially once we get our company fully launched and hopefully reports from MAX. Until next then!

As you can imagine, these kinds of forward looking sessions require a ton of research and theoretical process conceptualization since none of the above mentioned products are finalized or released yet. Our goal with this research is two-fold: build a kick ass presentation and post about interesting tidbits that Aaron and I discover along the way. This research is what lead to the Flex 4 source in Flex Builder 3 post and as Aaron and I dig deeper into the session I will continue to add more posts.

I read a great analysis article by Grant Skinner, talking about the different Open Source licenses and how they can affect you and your client. I originally licensed the code library under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) due to its popularity, its freedom to allow developers to build on top of the code base for any purpose (free or for charge) and only requires code modification submission if the developer changed the original code in the library. My goal with VivMedia is to help developers build great applications, and the last thing I wanted to do is limit them, yet I do want to encourage people to submit changes and updates. That is why I went with MPL at first.

The issue with MPL (as Grant points out) is that when you use MPL code there are certain steps you need to take to release your project. In most cases this is not a big deal and it very rarely impacts the project but it may cause some developers or their clients a bit of grief. In all honesty, I just want to create a library that myself and others can use without having to jump through hoops with our clients. This lead me to change all the code license to MIT, which is very permissive of all forms of development. All you need to do is keep the MIT license headers in the source. You don’t have to submit changes (all thought I would be very happy if you did) and you don’t have to jump through any other legal hoops when deploying. So, if you are using the library already, update to the new version and know that the door is now wide open and you don’t have to fret about how you or your clients release the work.

The other addition to this version is the new Queue data structure. The Queue allows you to add and remove items is in a linear fashion. You can define the Queue as either Last in First Out (LIFO) or First in First Out (FIFO). What that means is when you add() item A and item B to the Queue and then call next(), the item returned is dependent if the queue is set to LIFO or FIFO. A LIFO Queue returns item B, since it was the last item added. A FIFO Queue returns item A since it was the first item added. As always, a full tutorial will be posted soon on how to use the Queue in your code.

The Queue is a building block for a lot of new functionality that I am starting to plan out. There will probably be variations of the Queue going forward too. For example a version that is designed to help solve Asynchronous issues in a Synchronous fashion, without you having to write a lot of logic around the actions. Right now, its all about what time permits… and as I said in the last post, vacation is nearly here! So, update/download the library, check out the ASDocs in the source (I always update them for each release) and let me know what you all think.

Hopefully, when I get back and settled in I will have a few more cycles to sit down and write, although looking at my calender and what is planned this may be tough. There are some big plans for this fall and I can’t wait to start talking about them but for now its heads down and work, work, work.

One of the challenges of writing an article like this is first defining your audience and then determining how to cover the topic in the alloted text. The Edge sets a word count guideline and this limits how deep I could or in this case could not go. Personally, I fully support the word count guide because this both focuses the topic and generates more digestible articles. Yet, on a topic as broad and as deep as this one I had to focus more on an introductory guide to coding standards and adoption.

The second challenge is determining your audience. My goal was to create an article that worked for both readers who have never heard of coding standards, and readers that have been using them for years. I always try to create a broad stripe across my reader base because I want to inform as many people as possible. This thought process was kind of beaten into me during my years as a Technical Support rep and team-lead at Macromedia. There is nothing like having to write Tech-notes and email support to teach you how to write to a broad audience.

The main point I wanted to get across with this article is that coding standards are actually much more then just code formating. Code formatting, or code conventions, really focus on how you name variables, methods, classes, etc. Yet, this is just the tip of the coding standards iceberg. One of the least discussed aspects of coding standards is the adoption and implementation practice of code design patterns. As developers, we need to better understand how adoption of patterns, frameworks and micro-architectures help structure our code. Not only do they provided rapid development but they also help guide us into a more structured development process.

As RIA and web application development expands we are seeing a demand for much more complex and scalable applications. Scalability is not just about user load but includes further expansion of features and performance over time. More and more developers are being asked to create applications that have a lifespan longer then just a few months. Some people may gaffe at that comment, but if you look at a lot of “rich” applications up to this point, most have been for marketing campaigns and advertising. The nature of these kinds of projects do not focus on lifespan and version updates. Their focus is on making them work in a short time to meet the marketing deadline and then get them out the door.

With the trend of Web 2.0 (which I hate as a term), the web world is quickly being pushed into the long standing Desktop Software model. This is forcing a lot of us to re-evaluate how we design and develop our online enabled applications. This is a scary yet wonderful time in our industry as we are rapidly adopting and developing new ways of web application design and construction. Due to this push I feel its time to help expose more of us to coding standards. My article is more a call to arms then a definitive guide to coding standards implementation. If you are interested, take a read and add your thoughts to the comments…

Since then I started writing post in Textmate and I realized that there is probably blogging support already built into it. I was correct and the pre-bundled release has blogging support with markdown already installed. Markdown is a plain text markup language that you can be parsed by the markdown engine that was written in perl. It was ported over to PHP and supposedly is now bundled into Wordpress.

I figured I would try it out and see how it goes using this new syntax and the blogging bundle in Textmate. Hopefully it works right out of the box!

Update: Well… it didn’t work the first time up. The issue was that I didn’t have PHP Markdown installed. Apparently its not fully bundled with it or I may have deleted the plugin. It now works and honestly this is freaking awesome how powerful and simple the syntax is and how the Textmate plugin works.

The first layout was a theme that started out as the Kubrick layout and I then hacked it to hell using my uber-l337 PHP skillz (it was my 2nd PHP project ever, so they were non-existant).  I had never really worked with Wordpress nor had I used much PHP so it was a thrilling piece of shit that amazed even me that it worked. During the design time I came up with the Vivisecting Media name (thanks to Nevada) and I so bought the domain www.vivisectingmedia.com.

I still kept the blog hosted at james.fakescience.com (since I spent all this time getting it working) and set up a mirror for vivmedia to point to the link.  I finally got around to updating the dashboard to link eveything to vivmedia but in essence it was just a stupid mirror and really, really annoyed me (but too lazy to change).

After blogging for a while, we (Fake Science founders) decided to launch Dicta and start using that as our industry mouthpiece.  Sadly, VivMedia became an abandon blog like so many others have and started collecting cobwebs.  

Eventually we closed down FS and I felt it was time to dust off VivMedia and breathe some new life into it.  I was now a consultant and one of my goals was to start blogging about the technologies that I put a lot of time and energy into.

As time tromped on Wordpress kept updating and rolling out new features.  One of the features I was looking into were Widgets, but because I had a frankenstein theme that was designed for Wordpress 1.2 it didn’t really support them.  I was also getting frustrated that my CSS failed on IE (all text centered) and I had no time or patience to try and re-hack the theme.  

Finally, with the launch of Wordpress 2.5 I felt it was about damn time to move off of my crappy theme and put the blog on a proper domain.  So today is the day and I rolled out my new theme and hosted domain.  I assume things are broken (such as Disqus comments not following to the new domain) and the feed is not exactly right.  But its there… and hopefully over the next week or so all the bugs will be shaken off.  I hope you like the new look and the new site, because I really do!

Update: Disqus does it right, again!  Their support got to me right away and fixed the commenting issue for me.  After running my own startup and handling customer support I know how much a pain this can be.  Thanks Jason!!

First off, let’s talk about what a mid-level developer is and how they fit into the developer ecosystem. For simplicity’s sake we have split the industry’s developer community into three tiers: junior, mid-level and senior. This is a generalization, but works for most of us in the industry. So what does this tiering mean and how do we judge what level a developer is?

Starting with the senior developer, these are extremely experienced veterans in the industry (6+ years usually) who have titles such as Lead Developer, Interactive Architect, Senior Developer, etc. They often lead teams of developers, guide product/application development and understand the inner workings of multiple technologies and languages. Senior developers are not always judged by their time in the industry. Some young developers are incredibly talented and have the Senior title. Some developers have decades of experience but are so specialized in one minute area that they have almost no knowledge of the broader spectrum around them.

The ideal senior developer has experience in a breadth of technologies. They are desirable because they can bring wisdom, experience and guidence to a project. Senior developers are often able to dictate where they want to work because of what they bring to the table. They are also very expensive to hire and usually the project does not warrant a team made entirely of Senior developers.  This additional expense is just not practical from a cost management perspective.

Next up, the junior developer. The junior developer is usually fresh out of school or are jumping into to the industry for the first time. Junior developers are often hungry to learn but need a lot of guidence. They usually don’t have the experience or the confidence to be “thrown to the wolves” in a project. The beautiful thing about junior developers is that if you have the time and resources to invest in them, they grow rapidly into the much needed mid-level developer.

So now, the mythical and much need mid-level developer. These developers have two to five years experience and have a solid grasp on multiple technologies. Not only do they have the experience, they have the confidence to face a new challenge knowing they can overcome and solve the problem. A mid-level developer is usually still hungry for new tech/knowledge yet are not as ingrained into habits (good or bad) that you find in most senior developers. Mid-level developers are the back bone of the team; they want to learn and grow by working with senior members but also have the chops to teach and guide the junior developers.

Unfortunately in today’s industry we have a plethora of junior developers, a strong stable of senior developers but almost no mid-level developers to be found. This is a terrible predicament to be in because you can’t build a team of just junior and/or senior developers. Most projects have tight deadlines, so the weight unfairly falls onto one or the other’s shoulders.

In this kind of situation, senior developers are often given too many tasks because “they are the only ones that can do it” and find themselves mainly having to do tasks that are not in their job description. Its one thing to chip in when it is needed, but when the senior developer is loaded up with mostly boring or trivial tasks they will start to look elsewhere. As I mentioned, a good experienced developer can find work anywhere and if they are stuck doing what they consider “crap work” they will look elsewhere. This is exactly what the “direct recruiting” tactic I blogged about is targeting: find the dissatisfied senior developer and bring them to a new project.

For the junior developers, they are often told to sink or swim in this kind of structure. The Senior developers are swamped with tasks and have no time to properly mentor or guide the new developer. This means the junior is left to try and figure it out for themselves. This is often a disaster, from a project standpoint. Without proper guidence, bad or unwise decisions are made due to lack of knowledge or skill which can have a huge impact on the success of a project. Not only does it hinder the project, you burn out the developers due to the extra hours they have to work. Even worse, it causes them massive frustration from the knowledge that they are probably doing the wrong thing but don’t know how to fix it.

So back to the original question, where are our mid-level developers? On multiple occasions I have had the opportunity’s to talk to developers, hiring managers, and industry leaders about this issue and we keep coming to the same conclusion: the tech industry’s focus on a a single quarter’s profit margin is the core cause for this issue. This issue traces back to the dot-com bubble burst. At that time the tech industry was in a massive panic. Corporations where getting pummeled by their stock holders to stop the hemorrhaging of money. With the do-anything-to-tame-the-next-quarter’s-report mentality, the heads of the companies had to find the quickest way to stop losing money. What was the best option in their mind? Outsource of course! Why pay for one American developer when I can hire five in India, the Philippines, or Romania? With massive layoffs gutting the companies to stop the loss of money, yet still increase development and potential profit the industry moved the work offshore and this put a lot of experienced people out of work.

Many of the startups were folding and their developers began to flood the job market. At the same time, thanks to the pre-burst dot-com era, thousands of students where graduating with new CS degrees with the dreams of BMW signing bonuses and fantasies of IPO stock options. Yet when they got out of school there was no work to be had because everyone was closing shop. The market was beyond saturated and rapidly getting worse.

Jump ahead five years. Outsourcing is still growing, people are clinging desperately to their jobs, most of the students gave up their CS dreams and went back to school or found a new industry. Out of work developers were sick of the industry and decided to become lawyers, mechanics or teachers (I personally know at least ten friends who made this choice). Yet, a glimmer in the industry is starting to show. The Web 2.0 hype begins and the demand for developers rapidly grows.

Looking around at the post-dot-com devastation we find a workforce made up of crash veterans who managed to hold on to jobs (through brute force, luck or both) and starry eyed juniors looking to “make it” in the Web 2.0 boom. Instead of IPO dreams it is the hope for a buyout from Google or Yahoo.

All the people that would have made up the mid-level developers where never hired due to the crash. They never had the chance to build up work experience over the last five to six years. Instead we moved their opportunities to other countries or just put the workload on existing employees so they can do more with less.

Sadly, at the time of the crash the industry was desperate to survive and so intent on the quarter-over-quarter profit that long term planning was thrown out the window. Now, we find ourselves in a position where we desperately need the people we abandoned yet we can not get them back. It’s not a staffing issue in the sense of numbers of bodies, it’s the lack of experience. It’s brain drain and we can’t simply fill it back up by hiring a ton of new people.

As I mentioned before, we are now seeing the rapid technologization of many different industries. My father works in the print industry and they are seeing a huge demand for IT and web developers. Printers’ clients are expecting web portals to manage their print jobs, shops want the ability to move their now all digital files across the shop floor. Who can build this? Who can manage this? If we are desperate for experience in the tech industry how can new industries hope to fill the jobs? It’s an interesting time for our industries and economy, one that can not be quickly solved. It takes time to build experience and we are finally seeing the ramifications of quick, thoughtless decisions made in the past.

We now have to have the forethought to look at where the industry is going, how we can grow it stably to weather the ups and downs and most importantly not make the same mistakes in the future. We need to encourage new developers to join the industry, encourage companies to develop growth paths for employees, and build structure around how projects are managed. We need to do this and much more so that over the upcoming years we have a strong work force that is properly balanced. I honestly don’t know the entirety of all that needs to be done or even how it should be done. I do know that if we don’t start looking at where we are and why we are here, it is only going to be tougher out there for our developers and our industries.

Right now I am not looking for work. I have my own clients and my own sources for work. If I was looking for work I would have contacted you. I have posted NO WHERE that I am looking for a job nor have I posted my resume. When Michael finally gets me on the phone I inform him that I am not interested in a new position. I then tell him that he is calling on my office line and he says “I know…” with such attitude implying that he doesn’t care where he calls. He next starts the “Can you help me…” line that means he wants contacts of mine that he can call. I tell him that I don’t have any contacts or know anyone looking. He then has the nerve to tell me that his position is “a better place to work” then I am at now. Again, I tell him I am not looking and he then says “Its your loss.” and hangs up.

This is not the first time this has happened. I have had repeated recruiters call me on my office phone aggressively trying to persuade me to interview. When did this become acceptable behavior? This is not professional, especially the way Michael treated me. After that call I was very upset at the un-professionalism from a representative of Coit Staffing and I do not want to consider opportunities from them.

I am not the only one this has happened to. Aaron, who also works with me at this office, received the same call from a Coit rep and when Aaron asked why the recruiter didn’t call him on Aaron’s cell phone the recruiters response was that he did not have the number. Aaron then stated that if the recruiter had his resume then the cell phone would be available. The recruiter then stated that he did not have Aaron’s resume. At that point Aaron tore into him about his unprofessional manner and how he was not looking for a new position. The recruiter’s excuse was that he is using “Direct Recruiting”. What the fuck?

Luckily, I had one recruiter who was much nicer explain that she got my information from LinkedIn. The way it works is the recruiter searches for keywords on LinkedIn, such as RIA or Flex, find people with that in their bio and then call the current company the person works at. The recruiter then ask to be transfered to you so they can begin the pitch. This is just stunning to me. They are so desperate to place a good position and get their cut on your take that they will scrape the web trying to find a name and a sucker looking for a startup. Screw that noise…