Shedding Some Light

I am a mobile developer. I work in my home office, at a client’s office, my in-laws cottage, in my camper, in an airport, hotel room, and even in the car as my wife drives. My primary machine has been a notebook/laptop for the last nine years and it pretty much goes everywhere. Because of this lifestyle, I have a computer backpack and in it I carry my life.

I recently was asked what I have in my laptop bag. Someone I know recently purchased a laptop and wanted to get a head start on the list of items they would be purchasing. Here is the list of accessories I carry with me everywhere I go:

Portable mouse

The entire bag with the laptop and accessories weights 21 pounds. This version is downsized considerably from my older notebook and backpack (at least five pounds lighter). The laptop is lighter, the portfolio I now use is half size, and I parted with junk I don’t use daily. The new notebook has a Centrino and 4-5 hour battery life so I could probably skip the extra battery, but I never know when I am going to need it.

So what do you carry in your computer backpack or case?

Foxcast is an excellent resource for the Visual FoxPro developer. Just in case you are not familiar with the concept of Foxcast, it is free Webinars presented by knowledgable people in the Fox Community. These live Webinars are recorded so you can download them and watch them on your own time.

The live Webinars require four things:
1) Registration for the Webinar
2) A solid connection to the Internet
3) A long distance phone call
4) Your dedication and desire to better your career

The long distance phone call might turn some people off the live feed. The way I reduced my overall expense was to follow some good advice from Doug Carpenter (the moderator of this venture), and head out to Costco or another reseller of phone cards. I bought 600 minutes for the cheap price of two cents a minute. I watched Drew Speedie’s and Doug Hennig’s presentations live and used it for the session I presented, and still have minutes on the card. If the phone call is a barrier (like being outside the USA), there is always the download.

The only other problem I see for some developers is the download is big (~300 MB), and some developers still have dial-up, and others have to pay by the minute. My guess is someone will burn these files to a CD and ship them for a nominal cost (hint: there is a business opportunity, or a special contribution to the cause).

If you are someone who wants to present, great. It is simple and the folks at Visionpace will step you through the process and let you practice a bit before you present live.

I have personally received more feedback on my Debugging Essentials Foxcast than any other presentation I have made at conferences or user groups. The reason is simple, it has reached a larger audience because of the availability of the download. I also know the video has been shown at user groups all over the country and downloaded by developers across the globe. I could not have presented the session in person at all these user groups and still made a living.

Foxcast has enabled user groups to easily get quality presentations from outside speakers, and at the same time, allowed speakers to pass along their information and experiences fast, and to more people. Another win-win-win! If you want to download one of the existing Webinars, register for the session and you will get an email telling you where to download it. Simple.

The next one is scheduled for March 21, 2005. All around great speaker, top-gun developer, and nice guy, Doug “the report dude” Hennig will be presenting the topic “Extending the VFP 9 Reporting System at Run-Time.” I suggest there is not a better time to try Foxcast out than this month.

Absolute kudos to Russ Swall, Doug Bliss, Doug Carpenter, Drew Speedie, and the entire leadership team at Visionpace for sponsoring this resource and making it happen. There are not many companies in our community with the dedication, the funding, and the vision to make something like this happen.

For all those developers screaming to hear Microsoft market Visual FoxPro, well here is one example: Developers Report on Power, Productivity and Extensibility of New Visual FoxPro 9.0.

From Ken Levy: “The news of this PressPass article is being sent to many IT journalists today for education on Microsoft’s release of Visual FoxPro 9.0 and to promote the generation of media coverage and articles on VFP 9.0.”

This is definitely a step in the right direction from my perspective and hope Ken continues with releases of this type. Nice to see positive news like this.

Interesting details on how two of the Fox Community’s finest have used VFP 9.0. Great success stories. Thanks to John and Doug for their contribution to this story.

A call to arms: I hope all FoxPro developers have a story to tell Ken, the Microsoft Fox Team, and the big wigs at Microsoft. The more stories we can provide Ken and the marketeers, the more opportunity he will have to spread the word about how great this product is and the great things we can do with Visual FoxPro.

I graduated from Oakland University in Rochester Michigan 19 years ago. I really enjoyed my four and half years on campus. When I went to Oakland it was a small university with 7,000 students. It was better known as a school with the second best Computer Science program in the state (even higher than the University of Michigan at the time), than a school with a basketball team. We had champion caliber swim and soccer teams while I was there, but basketball not something that attracted a lot of attention. Oakland molded computer geeks, engineers, nurses, business people, teachers, actors, journalists, and other professionals, but not a single NBA player.

I am very excited to see our basketball team is in the NCAA Championship “big dance” and one of the finest universities around is getting some national exposure. Maybe the luck of the hard working Pistons is rubbing off. The home of the Pistons is only a 10 minute ride from the middle of the Oakland campus.

So to all my friends who went to the fine University of Michigan and over the years have ribbed me about us not having a real sports program: watch the Cinderella Golden Grizzlies march toward the final four.

I think it would be fun if Oakland plays the amazing Fighting Illini so I can have some fun with Rick Borup.

One of my pet peeves in this world is common courtesy. I have run into this situation far too often in my life, and today I run into it for the first time in the blogosphere. Instead of taking the opportunity to teach me something about blogging protocol via a short email or a brief phone call, I get called out in someone else’s blog for being a dope and not including the site feed on my blog. Heck, I have no problem making mistakes because this is one of the ways I learn. I just hate hearing about it through a third-party, or through a third-party source. I guess the more I think about it the public smack across the head is not uncommon these days, especially in blogs.

This huge oversight would have been corrected much sooner if I was informed with the email or phone call. It only took me a couple of minutes to add this to my Blogger template and republish the blog. Simple.

This is not the first time I have been called out on someone’s Web site. Years ago I wrote an article in FoxTalk on the new Top-Level form feature introduced in VFP 5. Several years after this article was published I was surfing the Web in my never ending quest to learn more about Visual FoxPro development. I hit a site by a well known VFP developer and speaker. Here is a quote from this posting:

All together now, let me hear you say it:
TopForms # SDI
… and don’t you ever forget it.

All kinds of people who should know better make this mistake, from MS support people to gurus to helpful-types on the newsgroups. I’ll quote from one example, from the lead paragraph of a lead article in FoxTalk engagingly titled “Using VFP 5.0 Top-Level Forms”. (I single out this example because it perfectly illustrates the conceptual problem. However, its author, Richard A. Schummer, is no better and no worse than many other FoxPro experts who might have written these words. Don’t blame him. Also, this particular article was written in 1997, so perhaps Mr. Schummer knows better by now!)

I never received a single correspondence from this person when the article was published or when they made the post. Instead I came across this posting years later and likely years after it was posted. I sent this person an email thanking them for the information and expressed my opinion about the topic I am blogging about this morning. I learned a lot that Sunday morning, both about Top-Level forms vs. SDI, and more importantly about the individual.

As far as a site feed, I guess I am truly spoiled by FeedDemon, created and sold by Bradbury Software. All I do is paste in the location of the blog in the New Channel Wizard and the majority of the time the channel is set up and I get the feed within seconds.

I want to take a second here and thank Rick Borup for answering my many questions about blogging and setting up a blog, and for his excellent recommendation to check out FeedDemon.

Well, as you can see this huge faux pas has been corrected. Craig, there are absolutely no hard feelings and thanks for setting me straight on the site feed. I hope this correction allows me to be added to your blogroll so others will get a chance to follow the link to my postings. And for those keeping score, I sent him an email before I posted this entry.

One of the few shows on television I will watch on a regular basis is Amazing Race. Tonight was the start of the 7th edition. It is definitely a guilty pleasure. I really enjoy seeing different places around the world, observing the human reaction to pressure situations, and seeing people extend themselves past what they initially might have thought as impossible.

This show is a road rally on steroids, but instead of one evening of excitement in your home town, this trip takes eleven teams of two around the world, puts them in challenging situations, and forces the team to manage their money, complete physical challenges, and work together to be first at the end of the segment, and more importantly at the end of the entire race. The team that survives and finishes first wins a million dollars. The last team to arrive at the destination for eight of the legs is eliminated from the race. There are usually a few non-elimination legs of the race, but the last team loses all their money and gets no money to start the next leg. This race has interesting teams. After a couple of weeks you develop favorites and hope the other teams are eliminated. It is a fun show to watch as a family.

The host of the show is adventurer Phil Keoghan. I am reading his book No Opportunity Wasted. This book outlines a philosophic approach to life which mirrors my approach. Live your life to the fullest by setting life goals, and then working toward accomplishing these goals. Phil adopted this approach after a near-death experience, and hopes you can adopt the approach without getting so close. Developing your “List for Life” is a contract and forces you to list things you want to accomplish before you die. Phil’s approach is different from mine because he developed eight categories and challenges you to add at least one goal for each category. This is definitely an interesting book, with inspirational stories and much food for thought.

I will blog my complete list one of these days. Many of my family and friends know I want to experience several natural disaster events first hand (earthquake, hurricane, volcanic eruption, tornado). Another one is to visit all 50 states in the United States and all thirteen Canadian provinces/territories. Another one is to see a shuttle takeoff and landing.

While developing a set of goals is important, the key most people forget is the list is dynamic. I believe the key is to continuously add goals to the list, even at a faster rate than you are accomplishing them. You can erase things no longer important to you. One of the mistakes I made several years ago is letting my list nearly evaporate and quite frankly, I was not working toward my goals. Without defined goals you lose focus and drop off the path. I can tell you from personal experience, you will accomplish much more in life when you have goals to attain. I believe this was another thing I learned in Kindergarten.

Over the last few weeks I have read postings and talked directly with developers who have speculated “what’s next” for Visual FoxPro. Personally, I find it a time sink with no purpose, but recently I considered something I had not considered before.

In the past Microsoft has announced they were already working (whether design, prototypes, or actual builds) on the next version of VFP. These announcements came before or near the release of the current version. How many developers do you think looked at the current release and said: “I might as well wait for the next release since it will be even better”?

Now you and I know having the latest release has much to offer in productivity and what we can deliver to our customers, but I would hazard a guess that many developers think they can save a few hundred bucks and just wait it out for the next killer feature. Others are just satisfied with the status quo or cannot afford the cost of the upgrade, or the time to upgrade their applications.

I recently started at a new client who has a system developed in VFP 6. I was stepping through a debug scenario and opening some tables while he was looking over my shoulder. The developer nearly fell off his chair when he saw IntelliSense kick in with the list of tables after I typed in USE in the Command Window. I turned around and told him, you have not seen anything yet.

I believe this is the message we should be spreading. Don’t worry so much about VFP X, check out VFP 9 and live the features that will make you life as a developer better, and the apps for your clients more impressive than ever.

You would think posting a help wanted sign out on the front lawn of the office would attract hundreds of resumes in today’s economy. In the world of software development we have a huge surplus of developers for the first time in the short history of this industry. So why is it so darn hard to find good people?

I live in southeast Michigan in the middle of the former rust belt. In the last year our little geographic mitten has been stamped one of the worst states with unemployment hovering over 7% (49^th out of 50 states) and one a few states running deficit spending. I find it interesting to listen to the politicians as they claim our state needs to be saved by moving toward tech jobs, and away from the traditional manufacturing jobs our state has been famous for in the late 1900s. Have these same politicians forgotten that Michigan has been doing a good job of attracting the tech industry for the last 5 to 10 years, and for the last four years the technical jobs have been hit hard by the economy? Maybe this is the reason our unemployment is so high, but I digress.

I have several friends who are actively looking to hire competent FoxPro developers. The requirements are simple: you have to know how to read and write Visual FoxPro code, communicate with end users verbally and in writing, live in the area (no telecommuting), and have a solid background in software development. In other words, they do not want someone who they have to train from the ground up. One would think there should be plenty of developers with these skills.

They have tried the typical routes of posting help wanted ads, talked to head hunters, posted notices on technical forums, and made calls to their network of friends and past co-workers. The results have been, well, pathetic.

The majority of people applying for these positions claim to have years of experience with FoxPro and Visual FoxPro, yet asking the simplest of questions allows the interview candidate to be eliminated from contention in a matter of three minutes or less. Hint: if I ever ask you to explain the difference between a LOCAL and PRIVATE memory variable, you better have the answer. Data buffering is not unique to VFP, but there are specific ways to implement it in VFP. If I ask you to name three third-party tools or two books FoxPro developers should consider owning, you better be able to list these off the top of your head. Extra points if any of my developer tools or books get mentioned .

JoelOnSoftware (January 25th post) makes the point I have been communicating to shops looking for good people. The reason most people sending in resumes appear under-experienced is the really good people already have jobs or already work for themselves and are busy. You may get a few dozen resumes, but if you are looking for the best, or even the better, you have to find a person who is not 100% satisfied with their current job or an independent who is finishing up with a project and is preparing to look for the next gig. This is where networking comes in and why I keep in regular contact with other developers in my industry.

You may be recognizing the trend I have been observing for the last year. The software industry is recovering from the Y2K hangover and the 9/11 attack and subsequent war on terror. Businesses have limped along on their older hardware and suffered with inadequate software for the last few years because budgets would not allow improvement. This cannot go on any longer for many companies. Companies willing to move systems forward are running into a shortage of good developers. The first issue, too many good developers became disenchanted and have left our industry because there was little work in the last four years. The remaining top gunners have fought over fewer jobs and have often settled for something less than they hoped for (both in type of work and salary). I already see the shortage. Not everyone wants to ship work offshore, and yes, eventually all the good developers in India will be to busy to take on more work and will start raising their rates for more reasonable wages.

So the lesson to learn: if you are a software developer who is looking for work, prepare yourself with the fundamentals necessary for recognition as a great software developer. Polish your core technical skills, communication skills (verbal and writing), and stretch out of the box and expand your knowledge of your favorite developer tool. The work is available to those who prove they are capable and have invested the time to make themselves better than their competition.

(In case you are wondering, do not send me your resume, I am not hiring anyone at the moment)