Welcome to the Dark Side

That is what shils told me when I asked her for learning materials for .NET. It is not that .NET is something dark or sinister, it's just an old office joke implying that Opensource is good and Microsoft is, well, bad.

I have began my first few steps in learning .NET. Right now I am reading a book entitled "C# for Java Developers", the very same book that Kristian and shils read as they wrestled their way in learning the "witch craft" -- the Microsoft Magic! So far, every concept that I have encountered is easy to grasp. After all C# and Java came from the same Object Oriented Programming concepts. But this doesn't stop in C# since I still have to learn the more advanced topics like ASP.NET, Web Services, Remoting, etc. before I can say that I am ".NET-ready".

Why the sudden shift of force (dark force ala Star Wars)? I am not actually changing my specialization. In fact I am currently a project manager and is not doing any programming task. I just wanted to broaden my expertise and industry exposure and also to prepare for .NET projects that I might manage in the future. But the main reason for the motivation was Topcoder. I wanted to be able to join a broader range programming competitions and of course increase my chances of winning!

Man! I'm into reading and studying lately! Aside from my .NET endeavor, I am also beefing up my knowledge in Requirements Engineering with the book Software Requirements as my guide. I have also just finished researching and reading about the Google Calendar API which I mentioned in my previous blog. Unfortunately I found out that while it is possible to embed a Google Calendar in a web site, feeding Blogger feeds to it is still not yet possible. Perhaps when Google mashup is ready for public consumption, that is the time when my goal will be realized. And while in the office, I am studying about the tool JIRA - an issue tracking tool that is quite powerful!

Call me a nerd or a geek but in today's world, good looks and a nice ab will not land you a good and stable job. Perhaps it will land you to a rich widow's lap but not on a niche way up that you can always be proud of.

Cross train, expand your reach, experience, learn.

Why Google Put A Research Lab in Poland

I have a strong feeling that our country is producing less high quality programmers than the industry needs. I don't have a statistics on this but I do observe it in IT firms as well as from the feedbacks from IT recruitement groups.

More evidently, the global competition in the IT sector belongs to the Indians for sheer quantity and to the Russians for quality. Why can't we be among these?

Goolge has placed a Research Lab in Poland, a country that you seldom hear in this part of the world. Why is that?

Tomasz Czajka, a 2004 graduate of Warsaw University, became a national celebrity in Poland after winning three TopCoder competitions in 2004-2005, racking up winnings of more than $100,000.

"When we saw these trends, of people from Eastern Europe winning these contests, we decided to take a closer look," says Kannan Pashupathy, Google's head of international engineering operations. "People have a huge interest in software, and there's a much deeper grounding in mathematics in the curriculum in these countries."

USA TODAY [click on the article title for the full article]

There you have it: "People have a huge interest in software, and there's a much deeper grounding in mathematics in the curriculum in these countries." One of the culprit is our educational system -- which is not something new. But I guess we can't blame it all to the educational system. It has long been like that and with the way politics handle economic issues, it will stay like that for a very long time.

What our country can do is to encourage our local IT firms to support our educational system. That way the different universities and colleges will know what the industry needs. Build laboratories, sponsor a course specialization, share their industry experiences and knowledge! There are many things that IT firms can do. But above it all, belive in the local talents and hire them.

"If you invest in the university system and support research in areas of interest, students will naturally gravitate into those areas," says Mr. Pashupathy of Google, which opened its Krakow lab earlier this year. "It's a nice circle which ultimately benefits everybody."

Pimping My Blog Site

I have embarked on a personal project which I called “Pimping My Blog Site”. I find the title funny hehehe! Anyway my experimental site is at blogger which you can view by clicking here. As you can see I already have started placing “blings” on the experimental site.

I have also enabled multiply’s cross-posting features so anything that I post at my blogger blog page will also be posted at my multiply page which you can view here. At the same time I will be posting the same entries into my wordpress account which you can view here. I have too many blog sites? That is what I thought. I am actually thinking of registering a domain so that movement from one blog site to another will not be felt by those who link to me. If you have been with me for a number of years, you will know that I move a lot.

But having a domain doesn’t solve the multi site, you might have commented. I am thinking of letting go of my wordpress account and might move back to blogger. Yup I know movements like this are very rare. Usually, blogger users move to wordpress because of the support and features. I find wordpress very feature-rich and impressive but the “web developer” in me wants more freedom, and blogger gives me that. And take note that I am talking about the free wordpress account and not a personal, hosted wordpress server. Eventually I will move to a third-party hosted server but for now, I will stay with the free hosting services.

Anyway back to the “pimpage” and “blings”. So far I have placed there a picasaweb album slideshow and a Yahoo! Custom calendar linked to my archives from PurpleMoggy. Then again, I would want to have Google products as much as possible in a Google-based blog site so I am thinking of replacing the calendar with Google Calendar linked to my archives. I tried searching for it in Google but I found none. So I am considering building my own through Google API unless someone can point me to a ready-made calendar. That, I will cover on my future articles.

So that’s it! Let the“pimping” begin! ^^.

Standard Labels

I am thinking of having a standard set of labels instead of random and many labels. To start I should first decide on what topics I should cover. From the top of my head, I am thinking of covering the following topics in this blog site:

• Project Management - everything that I know, discover, and experience as an IT Project Manager
• Software Development - everything that I know, discover, and experience as a software developer
• Techie - Reviews about hardware, software, software tools, etc
  
• Personal Life - my personal life -- personal experiences and thoughts
• Work - my life at work and what I think of it
• Random Thoughts - a catch all for topics that cannot be categorized from the topics I listed above.

But then again I don't want my label to be like "Project Management"... it's too plain. I need something "catchy" and fresh! Any ideas?