Having said all that I am always happy to talk to a recruiter or read their emails. Sometimes they start with ‘ Sorry if this is not right for you… ‘ you get the idea. I would rather build the relationship with them when I don’t need them than have to try and sell myself and my skill-set to someone who has no idea who I am when I do desperately need a new client.

I have a handful of recruiters that I work with I guess, but every now and then I get a call that even makes me chuckle. The guy was running through the specification for a new role that had ‘just come in’. It was all sounding pretty good until he read out “Must have ‘Double Zero’ skills”. For a moment I thought I was going to be required to save the world from some evil dictator.

“I think you mean Oh-Oh”, I said.

“No it says ‘Double Zero’”.

“It actually says Oh-Oh. It stands for Object Oriented. They are looking for object oriented skills.” I was being patient with him.

“Well you learn something every day.” He gave a little embarressed laugh.

And while we have a little chuckle over this incident I really hope he does learn something every day because I certainly am. There is so much happening in the wonderful world of software development not to be. I am currently  working on my Flex 3, WDA, ABAP, ABAP OO, PHP, Python, Dojo and one or two other things for good measure.

“Why not run an unconference for SAP developers and consultants in London.”

SAP Inside Track London 2009

We had both been to SAP Community Days and thought we could pull something off. So we hustled together a venue and a wiki page to handle the signups and sessions.

It was a lot of fun. So much so that this year we are repeating the whole process.

This year we have managed to secure IBM Southbank as a venue. Thanks to a lot of help from Zoe Slattery. 

The date is April 4 and there is a small charge of £10 to cover the lunch. (Signup quickly in March for the early bird rate. In April it will rocket to £15!)

There are several SAP Mentors coming to the event from Europe so it is a great chance to hear from them and particularly the ESME team.

Ant Phillips from IBM will be presenting a session on connecting SAP up with Project Zero, the community version of Websphere sMash. The other sessions planned for the day are on the SDN Wiki.

One of the  sessions is a discussion on certification. This has been a hot topic in the SAP community lately. New Mentor Michael Koch is currently running a survey on how certification relates to contractors. You can complete this survey here and it would be great to see some good results from that survey at the unconference.

You can follow the fun in twitter at @SAPInsideTrack.

One of the great benefits of these days is the networking and conversations with people in trenches.  In credit crunched times such as today these can be even more valuable than official training sessions and (dare I say it) certification.

If you would like to come along to meet the mentors, participate in the sessions, run a session for yourself there is still time to signup.

This is why my friend Thomas Otter is investigating in his efforts to become a Pointy Headed Doctor err… a Pretty Harmless Driver … err Purple Headless Dragon. Actually none of those. He is completing his PhD. Not to be confused with PHP which, I grant you, at some level is very similar but on others completely different.

Anway enough of the rambling.

I will let Thomas actually describe what he is doing:

Legal systems have evolved over centuries to codify rights and obligations in societies. Throughout history law and technology have interacted, modifying each other along the way.  It is often an uneasy relationship…

I want to ask as many software people as possible about what they understand of the law that can impact software, and what their attitudes are towards a couple of legal concepts in a software context.

It is designed to gather information about the knowledge, education and attitude of software developers towards the law related to software, and how law is or isn’t built into software. My goal is not to just have a small survey of a couple of hundred developers, but to really survey lots of them.

To do this, I want to tap as many of my readers  as I can to spread the news of the survey, and for as many of you to take the survey as possible. The more answers I can get from around the world, the richer the results will be. I will also be following up with telephone interviews with a much smaller sample group.

In this survey I have used the term software developer rather broadly. I define this to be anyone working professionally to design, build or maintain software (information technology). So if you are a product manager, solution manager, implementation consultant, systems architect, business analyst, or a systems tester, for instance, then we would be just as interested in your responses. The survey isn’t just aimed at those who code, but those who make a living from its construction and maintenance. Much of this group would fall under that definition. The Germans have a rather nice term,informatiker, but it doesn’t really translate very well.

You can access the survey here or use this link in twitter to get the word out to your friends social network, tribe or whatever the new word for friends is this week.  http://is.gd/eACI

In a world of SOX and Data Protection this is very timely research.

The goal is to get at least 1006 responses so that the data is statistically significant.  (You did stats 101 didn’t you?) I am reliably informed that it is progressing well but until you take 10 minutes of your precious time to add your response it will not be complete.

Happy New Year

Wishing my readers a Happy New Year.
I trust that this year brings you all you dream of and plan for.

Photo credit: Chanc

So I did a hasty screen grab.

SDN Frontpage

Thanks to @welshcathy for letting me know!

Advent Calendar

Last year the guys at OmniTI, primarily Chris Shiflett kicked off a PHP Advent calendar and while I was looking for it last week I was disappointed to not find one. At least not where I found it last year.

This year all your favourite PHP authors are back  at a shiny new domain with design assistance from Jon and Jon.

So count down the shopping days to Christmas with a great set of articles from some of the best authors around at PHPAdvent.org.

Photo Credit: *Regina*  used with permission.

How would you like to pay for that Sir?

I note, via a number of sources, that Zend Framework 1.7 is out. As we are close to going live on our project that is using ZF for the first time we will not be putting 1.7 into production just yet. The most interesting thing to me is the updated Dojo as we are finding those Dojo forms to be kinda funky. I am looking forward to playing with Zend_Amf though.

What would interest me most in a 2.0 release (if anyone is listening) is a Zend_Payment component. I am thinking a component with a nice abstract adaptor similar to Zend_Db that could have implemenations for Paypal, Google Checkout, SecPay (or is that Paypoint?), WorldPay, eWay etc etc.

I think that a payment component is a critical part of a web toolkit. On my project we are starting to build this out as we need to, refactoring old classes into a Company_Payment class and if I get really excited I may even sign the CLA and get involved in ZF myself. It would be great to have leadership from Zend on this get an awesome base abstract class to build off.

It would be great to bring everything together under one set of classes like Zend_Payment rather than the Zend_Service_Payment, Zend_Service_Linkpoint, Zend_Service_Paypal that are currently (languishing) in the Community Wiki.

This would be a great addition for a 2.0 release.

Any thoughts on this are welcome.

BTW if you are new here you might like to subscribe to the RSS feed for Getting Technical.

Photo credit: Roby72

Twitter database maintenance

I like the ice-cream but where is the broccoli ?

It really doesn’t take much to change the world and today as part of blog action day I am going to challenge you to do something that will help someone out of poverty and maintain it.

Maybe you are already doing something to make poverty history. Fantastic - keep it up.

If you are reading this post you have the resources to make a difference in someone’s life.

I am not going to prescribe that you support the organisations that I support but I have found that Compassion is a champion of those in poverty and works well with children, their families and the whole community to bring change in a region.

Having supported and sponsored kids over several years it is evident to me that they do excellent work at getting families out of poverty by supporting education and health of kids and supporting whole regions where they operate.

So on this blog action day focussed on poverty give a thought to making a difference in a childs life. It really will make a difference. You can’t do everything, but you can do something.