Showing posts with label London. Show all posts
Showing posts with label London. Show all posts

Thursday, 2 June 2011

Is London actually quite small?

I am now eight months into my current job and I have been involved in a handful of projects which have somehow involved no less than four of the other organisations that I interviewed with in the last couple of years.

Interestingly each of the organisations had either made me some sort of offer, or is still trying to recruit me.

I didn't do a shotgun approach to applying for jobs, so is the industry really quite small?


Update: Now my former employer is trying to form a strategic partnership with my current employer.  I'm not quite arrogant enough to say it's because they miss me so much.

Thursday, 23 September 2010

Technologies to look into

I've recently resigned from my job, so will have some time on my hands to investigate technologies - in between applying for jobs, responding to calls from recruiters, preparing for interviews and attending interviews.

This is a sort of "note to self" on some areas of interest, in no particular order:
  • Scala
  • Spring 3
  • Tomcat 7
  • Hybris 4.2 (if I decide to stick with E-Commerce)
  • Hibernate
  • JQuery
  • IntelliJ
  • PostgreSQL 9
Looking back, I should be able to combine most of these technologies to produce some kind of hobby application.

I'm curious about the transport situation in London, so I might dream up an innovative visualisation of the bike stations status, or something along those lines.

Watch this space!

Sunday, 4 October 2009

Advantages of the London lifestyle

I'm getting accustomed to carrying a technical book with me on my tube ride to and from work.

I've never been a speed reader, so it's good to have half an hour or so at each end of the day where there isn't much else that I can usefully be doing.

One of the books that I am currently reading is Refactoring To Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky. It's part of the Martin Fowler signature series.

Today I jumped ahead to read the Replace Conditional Dispatcher With Command section, as some code that I have been looking at recently could be a good candidate for this type of simplication. So far it looks like a more robust solution to what the original developers were trying to achieve, so I may add this to the maintenance roadmap.

Thursday, 17 September 2009

The state of agile

A few weeks ago I attended an XTC (eXtreme Tuesday Club) meeting in London which was based around people reporting on what their experience of Agile 2009 was.

The whole arrangement was unlike any kind of meeting that I have attended before. A bunch of people with similar interests meet in a room at a pub in central London and socialise. There were no announcements or presenters up the front.

I met a chap called Tom Gilb who showed me a few of the nice features of the new iPhone S - including some video capture, editing, and uploading to Twitter.

The only report back about Agile 2009 that I managed to (over)hear was Uncle Bob Martin saying something along the lines of, "It was okay, but there was nothing new".

It was reassuring to read a blog post this evening that indicated that other luminaries in the agile community were thinking along the same lines. It made me realise that Uncle Bob was not being cynical - and he definitely does not come across as that kind of guy. (He even didn't mind signing a book that I had in my bag from his Robert C. Martin series - even though it was authored by Michael Feathers).

Tuesday, 4 August 2009

My experience on the London IT job market during economic downturn

After a holiday in Ireland and the UK back in 2007, I decided that if nothing much was happening for me in New Zealand then I should head to the UK where I would have more opportunities to see the rest of the world.

In September 2008 my paperwork came through for my tier 1 visa to live and work in the UK.

I booked my flights so that I would arrive on the same date that the visa became valid, hoping to make a quick start at securing work.

Strange as it may sound, I didn't have any real experience of looking for work. My job in New Zealand had resulted from knowing a bit about a particular technology - CORBA - and a little bit of good luck.

I had initially hoped for some parttime work during my post-graduate study, but got invited to take on a fulltime job - with the option to continue studying parttime. Given that I was only studying to improve my chances of getting a job, this was an opportunity that I could not refuse.

Nearly 10 years later, and on the other side of the planet I had to actually apply for jobs and wear a suit to the interviews - as opposed to the "Pink and The Brain" t-shirt that had been part of my clothing selection back in 1999.

Working in a single company for a long time has some down sides, one of which turned out to be that the choice of technologies used did not match up well with what many job advertisements listed. Spring and Hibernate were the two biggies that I soon identified as being a big deal, so I read some books attended user group meetings etc. and even managed to win a 4 day training course.

After following other people's advice by applying for contracting roles, I started to consider permanent roles. After about the 3rd face to face interview I was lead to believe that an offer of employment was just a formality, so I stopped applying for other roles and considered having a little holiday over Christmas.

In early January the role fell through due to corporate re-structuring that had been followed by a companywide recruitment freeze. It was tough to get myself back into interview mode, so the next couple of companies didn't get a good impression of what I was capable of - 1 even told the recruitment agent who had represented me that I came across as though I wasn't that interested in being there.

After lowering my salary expectations I had more roles to consider, and soon came to the awkward situation of having to choose between two roles.

I chose the role that was located closer to home and the venue of the various technical user groups that I attend during weeknight evenings.

After being hired as a Java developer I accidentally painted myself into a corner that was labelled "Grails/Groovy development" at a time when Grails 1.1 and 1.1.1 were having stability issues.

At the end of my standard 3 month probation period the company shocked me by saying they were "letting me go". Given that I wasn't making much headway with the battle against the Grails issues, and several of their former colleagues had recently become available I can understand their decision.

Second time around on the London job market was a little easier. After six weeks and interviewing for eight different roles, I had two offers to choose from again.

I chose the well-established consultancy that offered greater potential for professional development, over that startup that offered more money.

No regrets.

Wednesday, 15 July 2009

Is London shrinking?

The old expression that "it's a small world" rally rang true for me today.

On my way home from a job interview this afternoon I thought that I recognised an old friend from New Zealand queuing up to use an ATM. Sure enough it was! After nine and a half months I have finally bumped into someone that I know from back home.

As if that wasn't enough, when I attended the London Spring User Group meeting this evening I ended up chatting with one of the 2 people who had interviewed me for a different job yesterday afternoon! Wait for it, later in the meeting I recognised the name of one of the attendees who had won a book in the feedback survey prize draw. Down at the pub for the obligatory socialising and networking afterwards I inquired as to whether he was a recruiter - sure enough it was the agent that I have been dealing with for the job the same job. SMALL WORLD.

This month's Spring user group session was focussed on Spring Batch and what is coming up in Spring 3.0.

I found that I appreciated the details of Spring Batch much more this time around, as opposed to when I first saw a presentation about it - after lunch at the Spring in Finance seminar day back in September 2008.

Seeing the list of what will be removed or deprecated in version 3.0 of Spring made me feel better about not knowing "which controllers" I had used in my experience of Spring MVC - a question that came up in a recent job interview by phone. The hierarchy of form controllers are being ditched in favour of the annotation based approach. So, I have only been using the latest APIs - still doesn't hurt to read about the old way of doing things (even if the MVC chapter in my reference book is 100 pages long).

It's a numbers game - Java developer interviews

Today I heard that I was definitely the second choice, out of the final four candidates that were interviewed for a Java developer role last week. I hadn't been pressuring the agent for feedback, and he was quite keen on emphasizing that the company will be looking to grow further in the coming months - hopefully I won't still be available then.

On Wednesday morning I have my first face-to-face interview with another company who interviewed me by phone last Monday. After the phone interview they had another eight or nine candidates to speak to, so I've already made it to the final three.

Unrelated to the job interviews, I've started noticing that some of the people that are following me on Twitter don't appear to be interested in the topics that I am tweating about. If I see that they are following more than three times the number of people who are following them, then it reinforces my theory that they are just trying to increase their popularity for no good reason - so I block them.

Monday, 6 July 2009

Maven - more than meets the eye

Earlier this evening I attended a presentation by John Ferguson Smart, a fellow kiwi who is in London running his Java Power Tools Bootcamp at SkillsMatter.

The title of the session was, "Getting Serious About Build Automation: Using Maven in the Real World". Based on his recent JavaOne presentation of the same name (slides available for download).

Before attending the talk I was probably a lot like most of the readers of this blog (both of you? :-) ) in that I had used Maven to get some jars/artifacts into projects that I have worked on, set up some internal project dependencies, groaned aloud in frustration at the maintainers of other external projects for not having their config in place as part of their upgrade process..., but haven't really taken the time to see where to go from there.

Here is a brief summary of some aspects of Maven that I will be looking into further because of the talk:
- the m2eclipse plugin for Eclipse, including its visualization of dependency conflicts (I've seen these conflicts in a project I worked on, but didn't know quite what they meant or how to resolve them by exclusions or specific declarations)
- the ability to standardize project settings using inheritance, including the option to specify versions of artifacts in such a way that they will only be applied to child projects if the child project goes to introduce the dependency ( block)
- using multiple modules to reduce the build time
- the Nexus Maven Repository Manager - refered to as an enterprise repository for caching external dependencies and holding copies of locally built artifacts
- the use of patches to manipulate differences in artifacts being built for different platforms, rather than having to introduce runtime configuration through external dependencies

I find John's blog is a good source of up-to-date info about tools that Java developers should be using to make their lives easier, and their projects progress more smoothly.

Tuesday, 2 June 2009

The perils of specialisation

I had an interesting meeting today. It involved the phrase, "we're letting you go".

I wasn't expecting to be made redundant, but evidently these things happen in Start-ups when a major release slips.

The last-in first-out decision was probably made easier for the company by the fact that I was the main Grails developer and they are considering Grails as a slightly immature and fragile environment "okay for prototyping but just too flakey on upgrades" etc. to be considered for deployment in the wild.

I've had a few job specs sent through from agencies already, so here's hoping the market is more buoyant than when I first arrived in London.

My CV now looks a bit more impressive, as I have been using Grails, Groovy, Apache Velocity, SpringMVC, subversion, c3p0 JDBC connection pooling, MySQL - including stored procedures and the event scheduler of version 5.1

Monday, 23 February 2009

It's unique, just like all the others

So, I've been going to a few job interviews lately and I can honestly say that no two have been quite the same.

For the first few weeks after arriving in London, I was applying for contracting roles. It didn't take me long to realise that Spring and Hibernate are a big deal in the local job market, so I started to do a bit of upskilling - Winning 4 days worth of training in the latest Spring technologies was a good start, but the timing of the course - December - was awkward as I had to second guess how that might be treated by a prospective employer - Good: training; - Bad - 4 days off before he's even started really working.

Reading the books and having a course coming up was never going to be enough to get me up to the standard expected when a company is paying top £s for a specialist, so I eventually agreed to look at permanent roles.

The first interview was in Devon and involved a long train journey - which half convinced me that it was not going to be suitable, given that at least some of the reason for my moving to the UK was to be close to Ireland and Europe for quick weekend getaways. After I had proven my technical prowess in a coding exercise and a general "problem solving around the whiteboard" discussion, I had the panel interview with 2 techos and an HR person. I decided not to proceed with the team lead role they were looking to fill as they were also looking to change their entire development methodology - and I could see that being painful.

The next interview was for a role as a consultant and was run in a cafeteria with a couple of techos, that would have involved me working at client sites and from home - which doesn't really fit with my preference to stick with developing as part of an agile team.

The third interview was unusual in that the company involved approached me directly after finding my CV online - as opposed to the agencies that I usually hear from. Their offices seemed nice, and the discussion went well - but I wasn't really expecting to hear back from them, given the timing and the industry sector they are in.

The fourth interview involved another out of town train ride, but ended promisingly with the guy saying HR should be in touch with me with an offer - hopefully before Christmas. So, leading up to Christmas I felt that my quest was at an end, but the holy grail of a steady income with that company ran away in corporate re-structuring and an unrelated subsequent recruitment freeze.

January proved to be quite a quiet month on the recruitment front, so I applied directly with a few companies and followed up on some companies that I had been in touch with pre-Christmas.

In two interviews I foolishly attempted to bluff my way through describing the design of a system that I had been responsible for developing. I kept tripping over how to describe a particular sub-system which a colleague had designed, but which was critical to the description of the product.

The feedback was mixed:
- one company said I was technically great, but recommended that I read a particular couple of books (one of which I had already read, the other I am in the process of reading right now);
- the other company told the agent that I gave the impression that I wasn't interested in working there

Given that I had just spoken to the agent to let them know that I would lower my salary expectations by 10%, as I felt that the company had a great approach and were really innovative in applying agile methodologies to their development, getting that kind of feedback came as a bit of a shock to me.

So, in the next interview I made a point of giving well thought out responses to the touchy feely HR questions as well as the technical ones. I thought that I was on a roll when the interviewer said that a lot of candidates hadn't known some of the aspects that I had covered... The interviewer deliberately skipped his questions about Hibernate, as I had stated on my applciation that I did not have commercial experience with it. So, I think that I was justified in feeling frustrated upon hearing their excuse for not proceeding further with me: the other candidates they spoke to had more experience with Hibernate.

So, now I've finished reading Java Persistence With Hibernate and have started posting solutions to problems other people are reporting on the Hibernate forum site. I like to learn from other people's mistakes, and get a feel for what areas are proving to be challenging. It's been re-assuring to find that the issues encountered are much the same as I found with JPA - but saying that "I don't have experience with Hibernate, but I've got a year of JPA and 3 years of JDO" doesn't mean much to the recruiters.

Now that I have some casual part time work I should be able to fill a few of those silly gaps in the CV and be set to hit the ground running - maybe I could give contracting another look?

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Reporting Potholes

I've noticed on the news here in the UK lately that potholes in roads will have expanded due to the recent cold weather conditions - the old "freeze-thaw" effect.

In some areas people are being encouraged to report potholes to their local council offices - which got me to thinking, how about setting up a website linked to Google maps to allow members of the public to locate potholes in their neighbourhood?

A quick Google search suggests that I'm not the first to think of applying technology to achieve something like this, in no particular order:
  • http://www.pwmag.com/industry-news.asp?sectionID=770&articleID=502140
  • http://www.daventrytoday.co.uk/news/Mapping-the-potholes.3798730.jp
  • http://www.surreycc.gov.uk/env/hews/hews.nsf/LERTF?OpenForm&CCode=POT~1&Subject=Pothole&faultID=58536393386
  • http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/3944037.New_technology_will_get_rid_of_potholes_and_save_us___1_5m__says_council/
  • http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk/call/2008/07/the-pothole-rew.html
  • http://survey.coventry.gov.uk/forms/pothole/index.html
  • http://www.journalofmaps.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/GIS/potholes.html
  • https://www1.walthamforest.gov.uk/webforms/pavement/
Then I came across something that looks like it already does the job:
http://www.fillthathole.org.uk/report