If you weren’t willing to camp-out for the new iPhone 3G and want one ASAP, it’s likely you’re in a similar position as me– calling local Apple Stores and AT&T stores everyday to check to see if any have came in. It sounds like at many Apple Store locations, as soon as a shipment comes in, a big line forms and if you’re lucky you might be able to get one. The way that Apple and AT&T have handled this situation is truly awful and unprofessional– none of the people working the floor know when shipments are coming-in, nor is there a way to order an iPhone online, etc.

One option I ended-up opting for was ordering a new iPhone 3G at my local AT&T store through their “direct fulfillment” program. Basically this boils down to you having a direct order from Apple which will eventually arrive at your local AT&T Store, and you don’t get charged for it until it ships. You get a tracking number and a way to check the status, though so far the results don’t look terribly promising. When I ordered mine the wait time before shipment told to me was 5-10 business days, and lately from what I’ve read the current quotes are now at 10-20 business days.

I honestly don’t know how this is going to end-up considering the HUGE thread about this program happening at the AT&T Forums at the moment, but it is keeping me from being obsessed about trying to snag a phone at the retail locations.

One other tip, if you do opt to go this route, you can use this site to get an idea about when your order will arrive based on other orders at the same store. All that you do is enter order ID’s close to the last 5 digits of your Order ID and the zip code of store you ordered from, and browse through the orders at your store to see if other people at your AT&T store have got their orders. It’s kind of hard to describe unless you’ve went through the order process itself, but you can find out more in in this thread.

I had pretty much written off Jython as being dead quite some time ago, but luckily it has had a lot of recent activity and is starting to catch back up with C-Python. By both hiring key JRuby and Jython developers, it looks like Sun is making sure the JVM stays relevant beyond Java and continues to evolve as what in my opinion is the best option for cross-platform applications.

Having a long background in ColdFusion (an Adobe language which compiles down to Java bytecode and runs on the JVM), I’ve seen first hand the benefits of moving a language to the JVM, and I look forward to seeing more progress on both JRuby and Jython on the JVM.

I’ve been up pretty late doing a little work and tying-up some last minute Christmas shopping, and out of the blue this Apple update window popped-up:

I’m super glad to finally see an Apple release of Java 6! I’ve been developing with SoyLatte lately and was going to write a quick tutorial on how to get it up and running on MacOS X, so I guess I don’t necessarily need to do that now. Although given Apple’s secrecy about Java releases and the future of Java on MacOS X, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have an alternative around.

I’m still on Tiger– I assume Leopard users are seeing this update too?

Though Java 6 didn’t provide quite as much new syntactic sugar as Java 5, the performance increases in Java 6 are pretty dramatic. I highly recommend giving Java 6 a look if you’re doing any development which runs on the JVM if you haven’t already switched.

Keep in mind that this is mostly a developers port as it’s not yet integrated into Cocoa, the MacOS X native GUI. Desktop applications will run under X11, but this is the next hurdle to tackle (though it seems to be a pretty big one).

1. Getting Started

Not sure if you were cut-out to be writing code for the rest of your days? Are you feeling different than your peers? Justin James wrote an interesting list– 10 signs that you aren’t cut-out to be a developer.
Now that you’ve decided you are genuinely interested in becoming a programmer, there are many, many ways to go about this. If you don’t have any idea what direction to head to, a good starting point is Getting Started in Programming.

2. Get Your Resume In Shape

Resumes are yet another major thing to get right. A resume is what can get your foot into the door into the company of your dreams, or put you in an infinite job search loop with very little feedback. There are many opinions and guides to creating the perfect programming resume, and here a couple which I’ve found to be the most helpful are Writing a Resume That Will Land You a Programming Job and Resume Pitfalls Every Programmer Should Avoid. Most programmers are notoriously bad at presentation and should also think about giving their resume a face lift. It also might not hurt to take a look at the 100 most searched for resume keywords and add them to your resume if they match your skills and experience.

3. Starting your Job Search

One of the best ways to get jobs is to reach-out and network with people you know to see what jobs they know about. The most natural and unobtrusive way to do this is to sign-up for LinkedIn and import your address book.

A good way to see what sort of jobs are out there and what the market is like is to use a job aggregator and search engine like indeed.com. There are also some other sites to take a look at which it doesn’t have permission to index such as craigslist. You may also find out about jobs through local mailing lists or user groups. You could also check into companies that you like and are interested in by going to their website and seeing if they have any open positions which fit your skills and experience.

There are of course many large and popular job sites which you might want to hit individually if you aren’t finding what you’re looking for via indeed.com– sites like Monster, HotJobs, and Dice are all good places to start.

4. Prepare For The Big Interview

If you’ve been in the industry for awhile you know that what you can expect during the interview process is it being completely unexpected. There are a wide variety of interview techniques used by companies, and none of them seem to be the same. I think one really good overview on what to do is Preparing for a Software Engineering Interview. While that is a good overview, you have to prepare for a very wide variety of questions. Here are a lot of resources to prepare you for an intense Software Engineering interview process including some general interview tips as well:

• How To Pass a Silicon Valley Software Engineering Interview
• Google & Microsoft Algorithm Questions
• 50 Common Interview Questions & Answers
• Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Job in Silicon Valley But Didn’t Know Who to Ask
• Programming Interview Questions
• Developer Job Interview Questions and Answers – This is probably the most exhaustive list of technical questions I have ever seen!
• How To Answer 23 Of The Most Common Interview Questions
• Answers To Technical Interview Questions
• Questions At A Google Job Interview
• IT Interview Open Questions Database
• “Why Should I Hire You?” and Other Favorite Interview Questions
• How To Answer The Toughest Interview Questions
• Five Essential Phone Screen Questions
• 25 Most Difficult Job Interview Questions (and their answers)
• The Top 10 Questions Every Programmer Should Ask on a Job Interview

Although you should be prepared for a wide variety of potential interview questions, you should also be prepared to ask plenty of questions of your own. Bruce Eckel provides a good list of questions which you should ask during an interview, and you should also be prepared to take some ownership during the process as well.

You should also make sure to dress appropriately for an interview– it is not the time to break-out your DEFCON 1999 shirt, nor should you make an unnecessary trip to your local department store for a suit. Unlike most other white-collar professions, you are actually at a disadvantage if you wear a suit to an interview, but you should at least take the time to clean yourself-up and look like a well adjusted adult.

If you happen to be on a team trying to land a new developer and you experience great candidates turning you down over and over again. One thing to be conscious of is how poor interviewers drive away talent.

If you didn’t get the job, it wouldn’t hurt to read 25 Reasons You Didn’t get the Gig to brush-up on your interviewing and presentation skills before you give it a try again. Or maybe it’s just a sign that you’re ready to start your own company or do freelance work from home, there are plenty of reasons you don’t need a job.

5. Got The Job? Improve Your Situation

There are many things you should be doing to improve your career and general well being even while employed. For one, you should always continue learning– whether this be new languages, frameworks, or even learning more of the classic Computer Science topics in depth, don’t forget to prevent yourself from becoming stale. The one constant about technology is that it’s always changing, and you will need to keep-up on your own time to stay competitive.

At the same time, being the master of a particular domain is not all it’s cracked-up to be– make sure you spend plenty of time outside of programming as well for a balanced life. I try to learn as much about as many topics as I can, and from time to time find some interesting lessons in life you can later apply to what you do. Travel to new places, try things you normally wouldn’t do, try new cuisines, and in general find ways to grow your mind.

Programmers aren’t known to be the most extroverted, gregarious people in the world (myself included), but you should make an active effort to meet new people in your field. Whether that be at user group meetings, conferences, chat rooms, mailing lists, message boards, etc, you’ll find that having connections in the industry is a very good thing to have. I’ve mentioned it before, but LinkedIn (no affiliation other than a user of their service) is a really great place to keep in touch with your network.

A topic that many programmers overlook is budgeting and investing– we’ve all been guilty of it at one time or another! It’s easy to be wasteful when making a decent salary as many software developers do. Here are a few resources which will help you get a handle on your money and start making it work for you by doing more with less, and investing more:

• 15 Ways To Keep More Of Your Money
• The Spending Plan: Budgeting for Non-Budgeters
• 9-Step Beginner’s Budget
• Healthy Food on an Unhealthy Budget
• 2006 Makeover, Step #2: Budgeting and Saving
• How to Create a Zero-based Budget
• Budgeting For Non-Budgeters
• 50 Smartest Things To Do With Your Money
• Where to Put $5,000 Now
• How To Save $1 Million For Retirement
• How To Invest $20, $100 and $1,000+
• 20 Investments: Introduction
• MoneyChimp: learn Stock Market Investing, Index Funds, Valuation Models, and more.

6. All Things Must Come To An End

Once you’ve been in a job for awhile, it’s pretty much inevitable that you will leave for greener pastures for a variety of reasons, or be forced to move for various reasons. You might even find yourself alone after many of your co-workers leave via a mass exodus in which management has no control over. If you feel that you’re in a salvageable position, some links which might help you analyze what the problems are in hopes of fixing them include:

• Why Top Employees Quit
• 50 Ways a Manager Can get Employees to Quit
• How To Lose Half of Your new Hires Within A Year
• Managers fail to find out why employees leave
• 1/5 Employees Quit Within The First Two Years
• Why Great Employees Quit, And What You Can Do To Keep Them
• Top 10 Reasons People Quit Their Jobs

Perhaps you’re tired of your job for various reasons and are weighing whether or not you should stay? A couple of articles which might help you make the decision on what to do include What To Do When the Thrill is Gone and Do I Stay or Do I Go.

Although this is quite an exhaustive list which took me quite a long time to write about and assemble, I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of tips or resources to pass-on. If you have any to add, be sure to leave them in the comments!

Thanks to Flickr user McBeth for the perfect photo.

What is MadKast? I guess I would describe it as the FeedBurner of social bookmarking & discovery– it gives your blog readers a way to share your posts, and also supposedly gives you a way to see other sites that your readers are viewing, analytics behind what your readers are sharing with other people, etc. I haven’t yet received any sort of confirmation e-mail about a way to login and view this information, but maybe that happens automagically once they have some data to work with. Until then I don’t have a good idea about the latter parts, but the concept seems cool at least.

Just thinking about how functionality similar to this usually works, I fully expected to have to go download a WordPress plug-in, unzip it and SCP to my server, then enable it in WordPress and have to edit my post templates, etc. I never really looked into it because I just assumed I’d have to go through all of that work and I honestly just don’t have the time or interest currently for that. I’m just spending an hour today to try and get caught-up on personal e-mail and decided to give it a whirl. When I saw that I just needed to include a link to their script, I was still a bit skeptical thinking I would still need to edit my post template to get it to work. Not so– it literally took just a few seconds to get up and running on my blog, so color me impressed.

I’m interested to see what sort of information I can gleam from the analytics portion of MadKast, and hopefully I can start blogging somewhat more frequently soon to make that sort of thing more valuable to me. I do feel like my site is starting to get a bit widget heavy, but it still seems to load quickly for now.

Have you tried MadKast? What do you think about it? Have you seen the analytics portion of it?

When I was originally asked to join the board, I had some strong reservations about it for many reasons, but decided to give it a try for the purpose of helping out the community in a constructive way. For instance, I’d heard about a previous editorial board for LinuxWorld who all resigned at the same time, I think not compensating people who contribute to the magazine is completely unethical, and their website reminds me of a “warez” site where popups, videos, and all kinds of other annoying crap invade your computer. Despite all of that, I assumed that being part of an editorial board would help voice developers concerns like “Your site makes the baby Jesus cry, make it stop!”, “What kind of monkeys are editing the articles?”, and “Why do you keep stealing people’s content and publishing it as your own?”.

I thought perhaps as a board member, I’d have a chance to read articles which were still in draft and help with the code and articles, offer suggestions, and maybe even catch some of those typos which seem to plague the CFDJ. Having worked in ColdFusion for (at the time) 8 years, writing somewhat useful blog entries for quite some time, as well as doing tech editing for a ColdFusion book, and having a Computer Science background (kind of a rarity among CF Developers?) this seemed like a pretty good fit.

Instead, I think it just entailed having some community names added to the board to show that they were involved but in reality none of the people listed had any say in anything, nor even had any idea what things were being put in each issue. We never saw any articles, or even previews of what a printed issue would look like. I would have even appreciated a free subscription for writing and editing articles, but I never got that either– it certainly wasn’t worth paying for. I saw the final version of magazines the same way everyone else does, by going to the PDF download site. As others have noted, we had no idea it was being shut down until the entry was posted at the CFDJ itself.

I really never went out of my way to promote the CFDJ or even write new articles for them because it didn’t seem like anything had changed. It fact, it only got worse as time went on– it was hard to even get any sort of e-mail response from anyone on SysCon on the editors mailing list as time went on.

That said, the board really put a lot of time and effort into trying to breathe life back into the publication, but it was for little to no gain. It is with a little sorrow however– I can remember when I was first getting started with CF how valuable the publication was. I’d say most of us were all ready to resign out of frustration, though it wouldn’t have really mattered since communicating with SysCon has been like talking to a black hole for quite some time.

I think the only way I can sum this up is– I for one welcome the Fusion Authority overlords.

Don’t bother. I already coded a Java app to do everything you do.

Good stuff.

And it reminded me of my days during the early 1990s working as a software engineer on the Space Shuttle operating system (FCOS). Many people don’t know that the Space Shuttle OS implements self-modifying code for the purpose of “fault-tolerance”. The Shuttle computer systems consist of four primary computers running the same software, and a fifth backup computer running different software that is equal in functionality. The goal is to be Fail Operational if one or more computers fail, and Fail Safe if all primary computers fail; this is called a Fail Operational/Fail Safe system.

An interesting read, especially if you’re a software developer who doesn’t work in embedded systems but likes to read about them.

I’ll try to update this post a few times later today with news and blog coverage, but here’s what I’ve seen so far:

• Microsoft IE7 Featured Add-On
• Mashable
• Profy
• Download.com (was on front page)
• Tucows
• Spyware Sucks
• Social Enterprise TV

In terms of my contributions to what you see, my primary focus had been working a couple of scalability items on the Java front, but I’m currently working on something new which you’ll be able to see sometime this Fall.

I just added the new Me.dium Widget to my site which you can see below my bio– check it out. In summary, it allows you to see the real-time activity of Me.dium users on my site and related sites.

Not a Me.dium user yet? What are you waiting for?