I know you try to work normal 9 - 5 jobs, but please consider this when calling people at work … If the people you call are worth hiring, they’ll probably feel awkward taking a phone call from a headhunter at work. Ask for their home phone number or email address - don’t even ask if they can talk when you call them at work … Most people take their work seriously, and unless they’re seriously dissatisfied with their current job, they will feel disloyal discussing taking another job during working hours.

Thank you.

You heard it here first, folks … Wait, on Asa Dotzler’s blog? That doesn’t make sense. Oops, guess I should have read the feature list more closely.

I agree with Asa, though - it’s about time Opera gets an auto-update feature.

Also, go try Opera 10 alpha, it’s awesome! :)

Funcom, makers of such games as Anarchy Online, Dreamfall and Age of Conan has recently been in Norwegian media not because staff cuts, but because of alleged staff exploitation (articles in Norwegian here, here, here and here). The articles mentions pending investigations by the Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority.

The main problems seem to be expected unpaid overtime, continuous crunch time and leadership unresponsive to critique. The parallels to the problems at EA Games seem striking, and there there the employees even went so far as to sue for overtime pay. Stories about other problems similar to the problems at Funcom have been circulating on the Internet a few years now.

Of course, I do not know how it is to work at either company, and media often makes things seem worse than they are. However, the common denominator for these companies are that they attract young up-and-coming software developers, thrilled by the chance to work on something they have a passion for - they would even have done it for free! This, combined with the fact that managers see them putting in more effort than they are asked to do, is perhaps what makes it so easy to either implicitly or explicitly expect more from the employees than what you can demand.

I’m sure if the executives at either company are asked, they will not approve of employees being treated like this - however, how people are treated is ultimately their responsibility, and placing the blame on managers and middle managers is wrong.

If you are a middle-manager, be very careful - your actions and statements can and will be interpreted in ways you might not intend them to be. Trust me, I’ve been there myself…

Finally! At last someone is making a book for people like me: Web Design for Developers. My entire career I have been developing web based systems in several programming languages and frameworks, but I pretty much have no clue when it comes to web design. Hopefully this will give me a better clue…

On the other hand we’ve been joking at work about how good developers are measured by the inability to make web pages look nice, so I hope this doesn’t backfire. :(

The New York Times has an article on the decline of female computer science undergraduates. I found that a bit funny, since I spent the day at a course on plug-in development for a content management system, and out of a total of 8 participants, 3 were female. Not a bad percentage at all, compared to when I worked at Opera, where there were just a handful of women working in the Engineering department.

All in all, I find that the IT consulting companies in Norway seem to have plenty of women… It might just be a coincidence that I’ve met so many, though. I don’t doubt that the IT industry is still dominated by men.

Bruce Eckel writes:

“Based on Yarko’s suggestion, experimented with BitBucket and the Mercurial DVCS and immediately ended up moving the project there. Hard to put my finger on why, but everything seems significantly smoother and easier. The BitBucket site also responds much faster.

Eckel is the author of numrous software development books, and is now working on a book called Python 3 Patterns & Idioms, which is being created using an open-source development process, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

I’ve written about bitbucket.org previously, and it’s great to see it getting more users and some decen projects.

CNN has a list of the 9 top tech flops of 2008, with the T-Mobile G1 as the first flop.

There’s probably no denying that the Google phone has its issues, and it is far away from being the huge success the Apple iPhone has been, but with it’s open platform and development environment it was probably never meant to be a new iPhone.

The Google phone with its Android platform is like the iPhone a newer form of mobile phone, where the user interface and experience has changed from being … well … phone-based to something more. For too long has mobile phones just been mobile phones, while they clearly can benefit from doing more, considering how much we use them.

Sure, efforts have been made, with JME and other APIs, but it has taken companies not traditionally in the phone business to do something more with the phone, and do it better than what has previously been done. It’s hardly perfect yet, I know, but it’s a good start.

Perhaps the Google phone is just looked upon as a flop because it was perceived as being something it wasn’t intended to be. From what I read, it would have been obvious to anyone that it wasn’t a new iPhone.

Perhaps old news for some, but the beta of Programming Clojure is now available.

One of the arguments people use against Common Lisp is the lack of libraries - wether or not that is true is a different discussion, but with Clojure you can use a modern Lisp dialect with a modern platform that has an abundance of high-quality libraries.

You might not like Java, but if you’ve ever programmed for the JVM recently, you’ll probably be aware of the effort that has gone into not only the JVM, but the libraries and the platform as a whole.