mit opencourseware

Have you ever wanted to take CS at MIT? Now you can.

piccolo patterns

Piccolo Patterns explains how to build Piccolo applications--everything from class creation to event handling. It's pretty remedial if you know Swing, but it's also a good refresher for those of us who've been living on TheServerSide for a while.

warning: declarative programming may cause excessive drooling

Declarative programming seems to be en vogue with the J2EE community. Java.net has published an introductory article on Java rules engines. Interested folks should check out Jess, JRules, and Drools. One of the development teams at UPRR is experimenting with Jess right now. I'm interested to see where that ends up.

bastardization of IT job titles

Have you ever noticed that most job titles in IT are taken from other fields. Software "engineer" and software "architect" are good examples. It is quite possible that a person in either of these roles has attended neither engineering school nor architecture school.

Since IT is so willing to swipe these job titles and prepend "software" to them, I'd like to change my job title as well. I'd like a business card that says:

Jason Shepherd, Software Masseuse

:-)

who can be a software engineer?

Daniel Steinberg has an interesting post on java.net. In it, he briefly describes the lack of standardization and control over job titles in the IT industry. What qualifies someone as a "software architect"? What credentials must a "software engineer" possess? Other disciplines--medicine, for example--have done such a good job of restricting titles to only those who have the necessary credentials. One cannot be an M.D. unless one has successfully completed medical school.

What allows a person to work as a "software engineer"? There is no formal requirement. What if the industry required a B.S. in Computer Science? Or would a language-specific certification suffice (e.g., Sun Java Certified Programmer)? Currently, there are no standards in place that map directly onto job titles. Admittedly, having a B.S. in C.S. is no more a guarantee of competency than an M.D. is a guarantee of proficiency in the medicinal arts (I've known several bad M.D.'s), but it does suggest an employee has superior training and therefore has a higher percentage chance of succeeding.

The term "architect" is especially funny. Architects in IT are generally senior-level people who have software architecture experience and can think in big-picture terms such as reuse, performance, scalability, distribution, and concurrency. Even the best college grads are quite a ways away from being architects, yet everyone seems to claim the architect title these days (even me!). In a humorous side note, I recall interviewing Java/J2EE candidates a year ago. One of the resumes told the tale of a candidate who had been an "architect" his entire IT career... even in his first job out of college (a 3-month stint, might I add)!

I often wonder what would happen if the computing industry spontaneously decided as a whole to standardize on titles. Who would be the body to govern it? Would the ACM or IEEE be good choices? If not, who else?

old == out; new == in

The templates available on blogger/blogspot are much cleaner than my previous Web site design, so I'll stick with one of these.

I've had my hands in some interesting software as of late. At work, I've been abusing Xalan-Java extension functions in my quest to extend XSLT for supporting localization. At home, I am exploring the Piccolo toolkit for constructing zoomable user interfaces (ZUI) as part of my Masters thesis research.

better blogging

In my desire to make my blog posts archived by date and generally better organized, I have moved my personal site over to blogspot. I am going to attempt to retrofit my Web site design into one of the blogspot templates. Hopefully this won't take too much time... my professional work and thesis research are staring me in the face and beating their chests. :-)