I’m not going to offer anything groundbreaking here. But having worked with a variety of teams of talent over the years, I wanted to articulate what I think makes a good Java developer. By putting these thoughts down, I hope to forge a little more of a formal idea of what I’m looking for the next time I run into new talent and have to assess it and work with it.
Unfortunately, the reality is you’re never really going to know what you’ve got until you’re working with a developer and you see him or her make that first critical decision in the project pressure cooker. Interviews help and code samples are great, but they are pretty highly controlled artifacts and evidence. They’re in vitro, not in vivo. Real life conditions for a developer are fractious. Deadlines loom, clients transmogrify, PMs hound and every developer action gets instantly tabulated in the ledger of present and future cost (how much technical debt did you just incur when made that lousy decision?).
Here are my few short and broad characteristics of good devs. I’ll follow up with a little discussion of how to spot these traits and why they are important. It might not be possible to know for sure you’ve got a good developer until you’ve worked with them, but it’s imperative that you know before you’re tearing out a third of your code base a month before your deadline.
It’s hard to think of a better accompaniment to Kazuki Tomokawa than that boxer barking in the background. I ran into The Take-Away Shows today on Vimeo while posting my christmas present home videos. Vimeo posted their 25 favorite videos of the year. One of them was a Sigur Ros video from the Take-Away Shows which lead me to the excellent Take-Away Shows Vimeo channel. I then moved onto the huge archive of The Take-Away Shows at La Blogothèque.
I’ve only just begun to delve into them, but that archive and the vimeo channel are full of fine things.
“People always mean well. They cluck their thick tongues, and shake their heads and suggest, oh, so very delicately.”
Norman Bates said that in Psycho. He said it in the parlor scene as Marion nibbled on sandwiches, taxidermy looming, and politely suggested that Norman put his mother in the madhouse. We watched it the other night, streamed it on netflix (I always said I was never going to be one of those people who put a television in their bedroom, but here we are logging countless hours on the macbook in bed watching movies). It’s a great film. Lots of long, jarring shots: Marion’s face on the bathroom floor, Norman’s neck and chin above the guest register. Read the rest of this article »
I spent the last couple years building rich internet applications in java. It’s been fun work but it’s a difficult, fragmented and rapidly changing landscape for Java web development. The release of JEE 6 brought a lot of powerful rapid development features into the fold (especially from Spring & Seam). But, the release does nothing to forecast any stability in the tech and tools for doing that kind of java development. In fact, the rise of the RIA and the return to a more client-server oriented application architecture signals that maybe the most crucial technologies for java web development (flex, javascript, etc.) have little to do with java and will never be incorporated into an EE spec.
So, while I rejoiced that a lot of the things I’ve been using over the last year (annotations configuration of web & data model components, dependency injection, JSF view templating) all made their way into the spec, I’m sure it’ll do nothing to slow the pace of new tech I’ll be learning in RIA over the next year.
If nothing else though, it’ll hopefully make doing things in a Spring and/or Seam way a lot easier when I get pulled back into the J2EE cob webs of larger shop jobs.
Rather than take responsibility for my lack of activity, I’ve decided to dump drupal (why is everything so complicated) and install wordpress. I’ve moved over posts….images didn’t come over so well…oh well….I may fix those as some point. We’ll see if this makes it easier to add content.
