Keith Pleas Blog
Keith's palimpsest
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"Developer Dawgs"
The "Developer Dawgs" movie:
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Certification: False Postives versus False Negatives
OK, lots of people are aware of the false positives of certification. Like Scott Hanselman, who says "I know lots of people who are certified that I woudn't hire."
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The "Golden Hammer" anti-pattern strikes again, with echoes...
Don XML - in his From The What Were They Thinking Department post - wrote about what a poor idea Fawcette's Enterprise Architect Summit was. Robert Scoble and bunch of other "MS'ers" (apparently, .NET developers) climbed on saying yeah, how can it possibly compete with the PDC, they're idiots, won't they ever learn, blah, blah, blah.
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Please save us from "professional" developers
Sometimes I feel like us "Morts" live in some kind of parallel universe.<sigh>
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Aw, it's not so bad being a Mort...
Mike Harsh mentioned the "Mort" personna that MS uses for VB.NET developers, saying that "In summary, the Load event is about convenience". Julia expressed some tongue-in-cheek alarm over being a Mort.
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Memories of developing with Office...
Chris reminisces about writing MS certification exams in his Blast from the Past post. Well, going even further back, our first contracting job at Microsoft was writing the Excel SDK. This was in 1991 and came out of our bitching about Excel-based development at the Developer Tools Forum (the pre-cursor to TechEd) held in Seattle in August of that year. In yet another demonstration of serendipity, we actually worked for Joel Spolsky. Chris has used his FogBUGZ on a couple of projects, but I haven't been in contact with Joel in years.
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Condescending? Who, me?
About my previous post on Certification Exams, Andrew Duthie commented in his blog that:
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MS Certification Exams
Scott Hanselman ranted yesterday about the people putting all their MS certification initials after their names. A comment from Mike Gunderloy threw me into the "way-back" machine...back to perhaps 5 years ago when Chris Kinsman and I were hired to do the technical review of the Windows Architecture exams that Mike and Ken Getz wrote the questions for. Boy, we sure fought a lot over those questions. Not sure why exactly: Those exams were pretty pointless anyway.
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Whither UAL?
On a recent United Airlines (UAL) flight I ended up next to one of their pilots. I've been a Premier Exec on them for a few years, have a quarter million miles and a bunch of upgrades "in the bank", and am naturally playing close attention to their bankruptcy. The ticket agents say "don't worry, we'll always be here". 20 minutes later I read that they're being delisted from the NYSE. I've got to buy tickets for Chicago, DC, NY, Milan, Michigan, Boston, NOLA, Dallas, and Barcelona. And that's just in the next 3 months. <sigh>
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St Louis .NET UG
I did a talk on remoting for the St Louis .NET User Group on Monday. It was very different than the one I did in January for the Austin .NET User Group. The Austin meeting was quite an eye-opener: A large number of the people there were from the Java .com meltdown and most of the questions were about bridging between .NET Remoting and J2EE RMI. For those who care, check out Ja.NET from Intrinsyc and JNBridge Pro from JNBridge. The wierdest thing about the Austin talk was the ride back to the airport: The cab driver was a laid-off IBM Java developer with a master's in computer science. Very scary.