Link Round-Up for 8/9/07

August 9th, 2007

Here are some useful articles and sites I found this week.

A former padawan of mine, Kirk Allen Evans, is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. If you’ve been to a Microsoft Developer event you’ve probably heard him speak on XML and Web Services. This week he posted an interesting article on Microsoft’s SOA strategy, Microsoft Does Have a SOA Strategy, After All. SOA or Service Oriented Architecture is a hot industry buzzword and Kirk applies some common sense to it. Since I’m working through a number of interfacing issues in the healthcare industry right now, I’ve found his advice quite useful. He is now a Jedi Master of this topic.

Speaking of expert programmers, Frank Wiles over at Revolution Systems has an interesting post about hiring programmers called A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality. Well, it’s good except for his extreme love of Perl (he addresses this in a follow-up post). I particularly liked this paragraph:

Companies need to stop thinking about their developers as cogs in the machine. They are more akin to artists, authors, designers, architects, scientists, or CEOs. Would your HR department rush to find the first person who would willing to take on the role of Chief Scientist, Art Director, or CEO in your company? Of course not, they would spend the time to do a through talent search for just the right candidate, court them, and then compensate them appropriately. They realize that having the wrong person in that seat is much worse than having the seat empty. It is absolutely the same with programming.

I’m a big fan of taking HR out of the picture as much as possible when it comes to hiring new programmers and putting the team the ‘new guy’ will be working with in charge. While this may mean some extra work up front for a department, it pays off big afterward when the right expert, or even junior team member, is brought on board. Read Frank’s entire article and the follow-up, they’re stuffed with great info on finding the right person for the job.

But, what can you do after hiring the expert programmer to get them to stick around? Chris Love has a good answer to this in his article, Working Conditions and Productivity. In it, he mainly covers telecommuting as an option. The savings for such a program is great in terms of money and time/productivity, particularly for those who live in a major metro area. It’s a great option for any development team and I highly recommend it. Only micromanagers who want to have lengthy face-to-face meetings at a drop of a hat hate the idea.

Finally, while I was looking into information about the upcoming release of VS 2008, currently scheduled for February 2008, I found this interesting video series: Programming With XML Using Visual Basic 9.0. It covers using the new LINQ technology with XML. I’m still working my way through the videos but it looks like pretty good info so far. Check them out if you want to get a leg up on the next version of VB.

That’s all for this week. Let me know if you see a good VB.NET or general programming article or web site by leaving me a comment.

Entry Filed under: Link Round-Up

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