I didn't realize my slow decline at work until last Monday. Monday we had a meeting and two hours later I was emailed a ton of materials that one person just whipped up. That used to be me. I used to get back from a meeting and crank out deliverables and prototypes. What happened?
My current excuse: I'm working on six different projects simultaneously, 3 have a hard 12/1 deadline (really 11/26 with the holiday), and I change between them 20 times a day.
I was surprised at how stable the Warcraft servers were this weekend. I sat in login queues of over 800 but once on, other than a few lag spikes, things were good. Quest competition wasn't as bad as I expected either. Tankisaurus, my pally tank, is 90% through level 74 and I've cleared 5 of the new dungeons.
So my team wants a "Flex and AIR rawkstar". Someone to fly in, throw down an app or two, revolutionize our development mythologies*, but looking through these resumes, I wonder if such a person exists. This is my first chance to be a part of the hiring process from the other side. And if nothing else, I've learned some great tips for building my own resume. I skipped the list of "technologies and stuff I know". People are listing Flex 3, then in their experience they don't mention ever writing a line of code. Writing CFCs and business logic for a site with a Flex front end doesn't mean you can put Flex on your resume. So I skip right to the experience sections.
One resume says "Worked with CFQUERY, CFUPDATE, and CFSTORED PROC for database manipulation". What about CFSET and CFBEER? Yeah, we skipped that one. And yes, there's a space in cfstored proc, apparently. "Used CFTry CFCatch to trap errors..." more tags in the resume. Say that you wrote in explicit error handling, don't say how you did it.
"Wrote modules for header and footer templates and called them all over the site using CFInclude". Okay, for real, stop capitalizing tags like that. Including a header/footer is sooooo trivial. Reading this in the resume makes me think "they think that's impressive? buh bye"
How many years of experience do you say you have for each bit of technology? I worked on Oracle for 9 months, but haven't touched it in 3 years. I've been using CF primarily just to talk between Flex and SQL Server for two years, but have been using it in some fashion for almost 7 years.
The CONSTANT misspellings are killer. It's "ColdFusion", it hasn't been "Cold Fusion" since version 2 and was never "Coldfusion" nor "Cold fusion". 4 years ago I went through a contract house and my agent went through my resume highlighting things and messed up a lot of my technical terms like this. I'll blame those agent-types, but they need to stop, they're making their client look like they don't know what they're working with.
Another resume lists off a half dozen sites s/he** worked on, that's good. But they're all extranets that require login to do or see anything. Don't include links to those.
References to internal systems...? If I said on my resume "Streamlined interfaces to VIDS", would you hire me? Now if I say "Streamlined interfaces to company's internal chargeback and budgeting system", maybe.
DO NOT MENTION FRONT PAGE!!! If you're a real web developer, you don't use Front Page. You never used Front Page. You hate Front Page and are glad it's dead. You can't say "Front Page" without spitting on the ground. Do you design web applications in Word, too? Saying "Designed and developed user interfaces with Front Page" is like "Preformed brain surgery with Playskool's Little Doctor tools". Maybe you can remove the tumor, but imagine the gory mess you'll make.
Include a web site link to your example work. And if it's a locked down site, take screen shots of what you can. I was really impressed with one resume that included a link to the guy's site. But then I go to the site and it's basically a slide show of index pages of, I would guess, site's he's touched. I don't know, it's just the slide show. No other links or text.
*That was a typo, but it works, I'll keep it
**Only one of the 10 resumes here have Anglo-Saxon names. I can't pronounce them, much less know if it's male or female. Nothing at all against Indian developers, but I'm already imagining a strong language barrier.
I've been playing entirely too much World of Warcraft the last week. The 3.0.2 patch last week has just about unlocked the entire game for anyone. I'm seeing PUGs going everywhere. My pally tank has greens and some blues from Nagrand quests but last night he main tanked Karazhan. We cleared the place in 3 hours and it only took that long because the other tank was new to tanking and being in melee range in KZ too. I'm finding that while tanking is fun, it's annoying to just see the boss's crotch and have spell effects exploding all around you.
Years ago when I played The Realm, an in-game friend would talk about her characters in the third person and I called her crazy for it. But look at me now!
I seriously dislike a lot of the mechanics changes for hunters. Pets attacking when on defense and you shoot something. Not being able to misdirect distracting shot. Distracting shot now just gives me aggro for the duration, why would I want that? The core hound pet wandering farther and farther from the target until he eventually pulls another group.
The fun I'm having tanking - having leadership of the group and how easy it is to get a PUG - versus my annoyance in hunter class changes has me wondering if I want to make the pally tank my main.
And with Hallow's End going on, I've been trick or treating every time I'm on and I can, and have yet to get a single mask. I've been told this is because I don't give out candy on Halloween. Game karma is punishing me.
Dear Blog Content Spammers,
Go to hell.
-Coding Murloc
The number of spam comments I'm getting - WoW gold sellers and other junk - is really annoying. I have captcha turned on, so either they've cracked that or it's actual people posting the comment.
If you post a comment that's just ads to your services, I expect a paypal transfer for any amounts made with a link through this site.
I have a custom employee class in my Flex that has name, badge number, phone number, etc, etc. In the form to update it, I want to only actually do to the database if the record was changed. The save function takes the existing record and the new record with changes and shoves it to ColdFusion, who generates an email with the before and after states.
I could have disabled the "save" button if the record isn't changed, only giving the user a "close" button. But there are a lot of fields on the form and more are being added in the future. I don't want some giant function that determines if the before and after employee objects are different, comparing one attribute at a time.
So I went to the kitchen cabinet and got some serial.
While not on a late night coding spree (lol@me), I've been trying to ready my hunter for the upcoming changes in 3.0.2. Namely by trying to get some more factions to exalted. I'm exalted with 13 factions and there's an achievement for 15, so close! I'm only friendly with Timbermaw Hold. If I grind them or Kurenai while watching LFG for a heroic, it shouldn't be too hard to get another 2.
Revered:
I hit a weird... thing in ColdFusion this weekend. I have a table with an identity/autonumber. When an insert fails, it's still incrementing the autonumber. So I insert a good one, #1, then three bad ones, and another good one and it's #5. It's just an autonumber so I shouldn't care, but I want to understand this. Does it increment because it starts the insert, then fails? Might help to say it's failing because of a foreign key restraint.
I have a level 47 pally with just over 1 day played. He's also dead broke. It's amazing to return to Gadgetzan, turn in 5 quests, and get a level and a half off them. But this means I've skipped huge sections of content. Lost reputation, quest rewards, and gold everywhere.
But what am I complaining about?! I'm actually able to raise a paladin as protection. It's a LOT of fun to run my horse through clumps of guys over my level, jumping off, and destroying them. If I map out my quest route well, I play for an hour and get two levels.
I don't see how two people new to the game can do this though. You have to make an alt to play with your friend, and use your main to support them. It's 9-12 gold to get all my spells every other level and I just get a fraction of that doing the quests. I gave my friend's druid 50g at level 30. He already had 30g, but now at level 46 he has 9 gold, and hasn't been paying to level any professions.
I swear I do Flex for a living. For 20 months now it's just Flex, Flex, and Flex. Yet it was just last week that I first used a setter function in an MXML component.
