O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Last week I started a series about how I use social media, starting with Twitter. This week I'm going to talk about Facebook. What is Facebook? They tell me that Facebook started out as a way for Harvard University students...

At my office we are currently standardizing our interviewing process. This got me thinking about the subject in general, and so I thought I would share some things that I've learned over the years from being on both sides of the interviewing table. In my last article I detailed some tips on how to interview from a candidate's point of view. Here I will continue that thread, sharing more tips on how to interview as a candidate.

At my office we are currently standardizing our interviewing process. This got me thinking about the subject in general, and so I thought I would share some things that I've learned over the years from being on both sides of...

We've often seen articles on why people don't like social media, the basics of how to use Twitter or Facebook, or even how to integrate your RIA into social media. What I haven't seen so much of are accounts of specifically what people are doing with social media and how it benefits them. The cool thing about having a column called "Developer Diary" is that I feel it lets me share my personal story with you. So for the next few weeks I'm going to tell you what I'm doing with social media and how it is benefitting me. This week, I am going to talk about Twitter.

Last November, Rich Tretola asked InsideRIA readers what topics they'd like the InsideRIA bloggers to cover. One of the answers that intrigued me was by a commenter who was looking for advice on how to make the transition from...

It's no secret that I was really inspired by RIAdventure - I've been to and spoken at many conferences, but this was the first I had been to that was devoted to RIA's. One thing that was kind of nice and kind of odd was that I had the womens' bathroom to myself. This was nice, because the bathroom closest to our conference room had only one stall, but it underlined that I was the only woman there. This made me really curious about what other women might have been there had I been at a different conference. It's kind of difficult to find out much about conference attendees, so I thought I'd look at the women who have been speaking at recent conferences or are scheduled to speak in the next few months. Some of these women are ones I've known for a while, and others I discovered by going on this search.

In my last article I talked about growing the skill of time estimation, and the different levels there are to the skill. In this article I'm going to discuss the different types of estimates you can provide. It's important to be explicit in the type of estimate you are providing, and to make sure your audience understands the type of estimate that they are receiving. For instance, there's SWAG. A swag is a Stupid Wild Ass Guess. I've also heard the first S sometimes stand for super, or scientific or sophisticated. It's not to create a timeline from. It's not to set expectations, its simply to give a rough idea of how long something or a piece of something might take.

Estimating your time One of the soft skills you'll acquire as you progress in your career is a sense of how long it takes you to do certain tasks. You'll often be asked by your manager to come up with...

End of year is a time when companies and departments reflect on the previous year and begin planning for new projects and challenges in the coming year. It's also a time when departments usually restructure to bring more focus and fortification to the challenges ahead. It's a time to re-org. Re-orgs can be stressful. If you've spent the previous year in one role it's natural to be a little intimidated if your role has changed. But re-orgs are a good thing.

Continuing my theme recently of detailing work flow issues and the resultant work flow solution, an issue that had been cropping up over the past several weeks and months is how to deal with third party ads changing creatives mid-campaign...

A few months ago, the team my husband works on was hiring a new developer, and I overheard my husband talking to a friend he was considering recommending for the position. I surprised myself by my gut reaction which was, "I don't care how good Steve thinks this guy's resume is, he's way too nice to be any good as a coder." Now, part of that reaction was probably the fact that I was working in a shop where nice people don't usually make it past the two-week trial period, but there's a part of me that can't quite get past my feeling that people who are too nice don't make good coders.

One of the responsibilities of being a technical manager is to optimize work flows and create self sustaining systems for the teams that you manage. One of my teams operates on an extremely short development cycle. They begin coding in...

Maybe I'm just an aging curmudgeon, or a classic DiSC C-type personality but I'm not a fan of social networks. I've tried to get into them, I gave them a chance. Years ago I tried MySpace and Xanga and just...

I didn't get a chance to go to MAX this year, unfortunately. But since my husband did make it, and he is both a Community Expert and a User Group Manager, you can probably imagine that I got an earful...

So after writing in one of my early articles about how once you've found a company that you consider a home that you should invest your time wisely and take advantage of the company's tuition reimbursement benefits, I decided to...

In the past, I've talked about the advantages of telecommuting. Today, I'd like to talk about the mechanics of telecommuting. Specifically, how to communicate when none of the members of the project are colocated. In the past, I've participated in...

When you finally do find a company that is a home, it's important to recognize that and invest time with that company. As I detailed in the first part of this series, there are many benefits to jumping from company...

Beyond the obvious questions of: am I paid fairly, is the company stable, do I like what I do and the people I work with, there are a number of questions that you need to further ask to easily identify a home. One such question is, "Are there working managers?" In some companies the manager of application development is not actually a developer and never has been a developer. Most of the times when this is the case the company has no career path for developers beyond senior. Or there may be titles created beyond senior but no path that leads to VP or a C-level position. In those companies that path is reserved exclusively for "managers".

One of the things I love about what we do is that it's possible to do it as effectively from the comfort of your living room as from an office. Working from home makes it possible for me to have...

The current economic climate notwithstanding, developers tend to change employers quite a bit in comparison to other professions, at least according to my own anecdotal evidence. From my own experience I've been at six different companies over the last ten...