作譜

The Register lists 10 signs you’re in a tech bubble. From my perspective, I would add to the list an item about getting contacted by third-party recruiters who have no clue about your skill set.

I can’t say I work for the most magnanimous employer where the purse strings are concerned, but there’s a stability here that I find refreshing from my earlier employment history. It would take, say, Nonesuch Records taking me on as their in-house webmaster to get me to budge. In other words, I’m starting to feel the other shoe about ready to drop in the next 15 to 18 months.

It’s great that PHP programmers will be in high demand in 2007, but employers had better catch them fast before they all switch over to Ruby.

If you want to call me a "web developer" or a "computer programmer" or anything along those lines, I won’t argue. It’s how I’ve earned a paycheck for the past six years (give or take a year.)

But I don’t claim an entitlement to that label.

My development skills were learned on the job, and there are big gaps in my knowledge that a trained engineer or programmer fills at the outset. I didn’t even know the way I build my sites actually has a name.

So 2006 comes to a close, and what do I know that I didn’t know before? Let me list the ways:

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Leave it to me and my strangely-named sites to test the globalization preparedness of a Web 2.0 site.

Yes, I’m being difficult by giving my weblog a Japanese title with not a single attempt at Romanization, but my little bit of Asian text is enough to gauge whether site developers are even thinking that far ahead.

The latest subject of this test is MyBlogLog, to which Ryan introduced me. It’s a fascinating idea — social networks for your blogs. Of course, I signed up to be a member of The Transmission, HawaiiUP and HawaiiBlog. And I added this site and Musicwhore.org, among others. (My profile, in case your interested.) In using this site, I’ve run across some odd things that can get a bit annoying.

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*Sigh*.

Oh do I feel wistful for the days when address-scraping robots seeking out mailto: links was the extent of a spammer’s threat. Of course, spammers have been hitting guestbooks, blog comments and trackbacks for a while now. But a contact form or a registration page — no advantage there.

I stopped using the mailto protocol more than six years ago, and the only spam I received from a comment form was sent by an actual human. Not anymore.

The bots are customized now. Someone out there actually took the time to reverse engineer my forms for the purpose of sending spam. I’ve been battling a particularly nasty bot in the past week, and I’m confounded by the idea someone had so much time on their hands to pick my site out of the millions out there on the Internets.

What the fuck ever.

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I’ve been neglecting all my sites in the past week and a half because I’ve been preparing to give a presentation for a conference at work.

It was a training session on how to design a relational database, then applying that skill to creating an XML schema. Yes, I know I’m turning you on.

I spent a fair amount of energy building my slides, and I practiced the presentation daily for about a week. Well, I made my presentation on Friday, and it went over better than I expected.

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I’m either really busy these days, or there are too many good links popping up at dzone at the same time.

I usually glance at the dzone feed in my newsreader and find little to get me to click. Not that I wouldn’t find any of the topics featured on any given day interesting — it’s just mostly stuff that doesn’t apply to me at the moment. (Lots of Ruby and JAVA links.)

But recently, I noticed I’ve been clicking through a lot more and thinking to myself, "I really ought to point this out to people." And then I get distracted by something else.

So before I forget, here are some dzone links that have caught my eye as of late:

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Found this on dzone: Open Web Design, web design templates for free.

My laziness and creativity are battling each other — I’m not fond of creating front-end designs, and I’d be more than happy to grab something for free. At the same time, I would like my sites to look like, well, me.

Using the criteria lined out by this list of résumé pitfalls, I think my own résumé is a bit dull when describing the professional experience, whereas the miscellaneous stuff sounds more flash.

While I don’t use buzzwords, I do list the relevant technology used at each job, which is why I guess I get a bunch of random calls from third-party recruiters.

I didn’t realize recruiters and hiring managers had that much of a disconnect with their filtering methods. I always wondered why I felt something was always getting lost in translation when some recruiter would pitch me a job description that even I could tell I wasn’t qualified for.

Remember how I toiled away at loading a Musicbrainz mirror into MySQL? Well, I deleted that mirror.

Running queries on a database as large as Musicbrainz was remarkably sluggish with PHP, and joins were practically impossible.

Musicbrainz does offer an XML web service. So it wasn’t a terrible leap to write a simple class in PHP to query the service and parse the results.

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