13 Apr 2007
We’re looking for a build master to help us improve our existing continous integration process amongst other things. I’ve included the job description below. If you’re interested (The position is in sunny Victoria, BC), contact me at adam-NO-@-SPAM-genologics.com or leave a comment on this post.
Position Profile
GenoLogics is looking for a Build Master to enhance the efficiency of our development, testing, and product release processes. To excel in this position you must be passionate about software quality and be prepared to advocate on behalf of good process and best practices. You must be comfortable working independently as well as part of a collaborative environment. You enjoy the daily challenges associated with enterprise-level software development and testing for a highly sophisticated customer base. You must have a positive attitude and a willingness to learn about our industry and customer requirements. You are an adept problem solver and thrive in a fast paced entrepreneurial environment offering rich learning opportunities.
Key Accountabilities
• Develop and maintain our build automation process
• Develop and maintain our product installation tools
• Develop and maintain our configuration management system
• Set up and configure testing environments across multiple platforms and operating systems
• Provide configuration management expertise to the Product Development team
Core Competencies
• Development Environments: Java, scripting languages (Python/Perl/Ruby)
• Operating Systems: Linux and Windows
• Web-Application servers (Tomcat, JBoss, etc)
• Continuous Integration tools and techniques
• Software version control tools and principles
• Product Installation tools
• Database Management Systems (Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc)
A complete PDF version of the job description can be found here.
11 Apr 2007
I’ve spent a bit of time lately working with the Facebook API.
As part of learning the API, I was going to write a utility that would synchronize my Twitter status with my Facebook status. No brainer. Vice-versa would be nice as well but Facebook’s API is primarily read-only.
It really was, the only kicker was Facebook’s rather lame authentication process. Basically, if you’re a desktop application, you’re forced to open a browser window to validate a token and have the user authenticate directly with Facebook. Essentially, there’s no purely programmatic way to authenticate with Facebook. It’s well documented in this thread on the developers group. Attempting to circumvent the process is a violation of the ToS.
Rather than fight with it any longer, I moved on to play with another API. I’ve recently started using Remember the Milk for tracking tasks, etc. Rather than use python or ruby, I decided to build a Java-based API for their exposed REST services. The plan eventually will be to pull some statistics from the service.
It’s still a work in progress but it’s fairly straight forward so far. The most interesting part of the exercise is actually using Maven for managing is that I decided to use Maven for managing the project. Having never used Maven it was nice to see something just work out of the box. The only configuration required was to add a few extra dependencies to the pom.xml and force the maven compiler to -source 1.5. I use IntelliJ IDEA so generating project files was as simple as mvn idea:idea. A minor tweak of pom downloaded and linked the source for dependent libraries.
I’m impressed.
I just wish we could replace our existing ant-based build system at work with Maven. I’m not the only one who would love to have a sane and deterministic build process. It sure would make easier to say, No, you really can’t do that.
31 Mar 2007
Ignore the fact that this post is about me searching for myself on Google. Everybody does it.
I’ve noticed a slight change in some of the search (Google & Yahoo) results.
The top results are now starting to include public profiles for various online services. I’m talking about Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Feedburner, etc.
Also included are personal blogs and depending on the search engine, particular postings.
There’s a lot of information held in each of these services, so it’s nice to see at least an entry point to each showing up. I suppose with a bit of grease, you could incorporate these results with more detailed information using each services API.
Intentional or not, I think it’s a step in the right direction. Ideally it would be as automated as possible, so something like Wink may not be all that appropriate (it’s interesting tho). 173,814,621 people indexed and only a LinkedIn entry for me. At least it’s indexing LinkedIn and MySpace.
Most of us go out of our way to prevent our email addresses from being indexed, but it would be nice if I could search (effectively) by email address (Yahoo did at least returned results for email addresses). Data privacy concerns aside, Google has a lot of information already and could easily do a mapping between email address and name. Or even for searches being performed by me, use the information from my address book as additional context.
If nothing else, it makes doing a quick background check on candidates that much easier. <:]