One of the things i dislike the most about being a developer is dealing with recruiters. Even if you’re not listed on any of the job-sites, these people still call you, often in the middle of the workday. I generally feel uncomfortable when you have to deal with a call like that while you’re at work because i don’t want people to think i’m looking for another job (which i’m not). So i keep the sound of my phone off, and i only answer calls from numbers that i have in my contacts or recognize. If i don’t know the number, i divert the call to voicemail (and i don’t really listen to those messages either).

So today i noticed that a certain number tried to call me 4 times. Of course, i don’t pick up. Tonight after work though, i was expecting a call from someone else and i accidentally answered a call from the same number that had tried to call me today. Turns out it was some recruiter.

Him: “Hi I’m So AndSo from DevelopersMeatMarket and i was wondering if you were looking for a new career opportunity”
Me: “Nope, not interested”
Him: “I actually tried calling you a few times today, don’t you even wanna hear me out?”
Me: “Not really… I actually try to avoid recruiters, to be honest”
Him: “Well, you do realize that recruiters are an important part of this business, right? After all, we’re the people who get developers great jobs. Answering those calls is very important for your career.”

owkey… if there’s one thing i dislike more than dealing with recruiters, it’s dealing with recruiters with an attitude.

Me: “Oh really? So tell me, what do you say to your customer when he starts complaining to you that i’m spending too much time dealing with recruiters for my next job?”

At that point he sounds uncomfortable, as if he had no idea how to respond to that.

Me: “Or should i start ignoring other recruiters once i start working for your company?”

Him: “Well, umm… ”

Again, silence.

Me: “Right, i think we can wrap up this conversation… good luck finding somebody”

And then i hung up. When will they learn?

Some of you may have noticed that this blog has been pretty slow in the last 2 or 3 days… perhaps not always but it occassionaly is pretty much unresponsive (30+ seconds for a request)

According to the hosting company there is an unusually high load on the webserver i’m on and they’re looking into it, so hopefully things should be back to normal soon

I’m currently subscribed to 110 feeds and everyday the number of unread posts is going up. It seems like i just can’t catch up anymore. Of all those unread posts, a lot will be very interesting, but there will also be quite a few that won’t interest me that much. So i’m going to cut back on the number of feeds i’m subscribed to, and i’m going to rely on some fantastic links blogs to point me to the best posts. After all, these guys already spend their time and effort going through a whole lot of posts, why shouldn’t i reuse that?

These are the four link blogs that i will be counting on to keep me properly updated:

• Alvin Ashcraft’s Morning Dew
• Chris Alcock’s Reflective Perspective
• Jason Haley’s Interesting Finds
• Arjan’s World

I don’t know where these guys find the time to go through all of those posts, but i hope they keep up the great work

So do yourself a favor, check out these link blogs and maybe you can save yourself some time as well

We all think that Google knows everything, but Google Reader is not as smart apparently… i found this in my Recommended Feeds:

but i think this is cool:

i know… i know… total geek.

The perfect workplace for me is a place where:

• People have the required skills and motivation to perform their jobs competently
• People are honest about mistakes they make… after all, we all make them so we might as well all be honest about them
• People who play the political game are fired, or if possible, not hired
• People aren’t offended when told that something they did was not good or could be better
• People who are sick just stay home instead of infecting others
• It is accepted that developers spend a little of their worktime to read blogs, mailinglists, etc… to learn
• People are judged on what they do, not how busy they look
• People who work together on something are located in the same room
• People have enough common sense to go to a meeting room or a more secluded area to discuss something that is specific to their project, so they won’t bother everyone else in the room. If that’s not possible, a little bit of voice control would be nice
• People don’t engage in Buzzword Driven Development ( = claiming to do certain practices or activities while in reality hardly doing them or doing a half-assed job of them)
• Managers trust the developers
• Managers don’t make promises they know they can’t keep
• Managers prefer a long-term vision instead of going for the quick short-term win while completely ignoring the negative consequences that will pop up after they have been reassigned
• They have proper airconditioning
• You have access to cheap (or free) drinks and snacks of a wide variety

Unfortunately I was sentenced to Enterprise Hell about 5.5 years ago so I’m not used to most of the stuff mentioned in the list… luckily i’m up for parole in about 2 months!

this is for the Build Notification power tool for TFS 2008. 34 megs of RAM… for a little system tray icon that notifies you when a build has started/stopped. And it’s only watching 3 builds. 34 megs of RAM. Unbelievable…

just read this in the documentation of a function i need to use:

If the function returns ERROR_SUCCESS, the spooler marks the port as added.

who comes up with this stuff? seriously…

The first nightly build of the Resharper 4 EAP (Early Access Program) is finally available… About a month ago my resharper 3.1 broke on my system, to the point where i simply had to uninstall it to even be able to use Visual Studio. Reinstalling resharper didn’t work either. And coding without resharper was so annoying i just gave up and decided to wait until the first preview of 4.0 would be available. After all, it was supposed to come out in January. The preview has slipped a couple of weeks apparently but now it’s finally here. Just installed it and it at least doesn’t crash Visual Studio anymore like the previous version did. Now i can finally start coding again in my spare time

Here’s a quick overview of some of the new features and you can download it here.

A coworker of mine just started blogging and in his first post he said something that made me think:

And I must admit, the thought of showing of my knowledge to the world through the same means - a blog - has crossed my mind more than once.

And that probably captures the motivation behind the majority of all tech related blogs: showing off our knowledge. Showing people how smart and great we all are. Who doesn’t like to come off smart to his/her peers? Of course, most of us will tell you that we’re only interested in sharing or spreading knowledge. And there’s definitely a lot of truth to that. But don’t let us fool you… it surely isn’t the only reason we’re blogging about our technical adventures. The other reason is simply Intellectual Vanity. We think we have interesting stuff to say, or interesting content to share, so we do it. And we hope people like it and learn from it. And i’ll bet most of us hope people will think we’re good at what we do because of it. It makes us feel good when people say “i liked that stuff you wrote on subject X” or “those examples really helped me out, thx!”.

To me, there’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of great stuff is being produced and shared because of this and a lot of people are learning from it. That’s always a good thing. Some people take it too far though. There are some tech bloggers that don’t really produce anything meaningful or original. Some of them are just recycling material from other bloggers or are just rephrasing press announcements from large software vendors they have an affinity for. Some of them are just praising whatever new technology comes out without actually giving it a critical look. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t need to critize everything new that comes out but we should be honest about those new technologies. So why do these people even have a blog? Probably the same Intellectual Vanity that drives the good blogs and the meaningful content. Some people are only doing it for the name recognition i suppose…

A certain developer who used to work on a large project where i worked is a good example of this. He was pretty much worthless as a developer, yet from reading his blog you could get the impression that he’s an expert at what he does. Yes, he’s involved in the ‘community’ and is no doubt working hard on his career. He easily impresses people with simple demos of new technology and is making a good name for himself with the kind of people who are easily impressed by fancy ‘hello world’ applications. But he has about a snowball’s chance in hell to become a productive member of a real development team in ‘real-life’ projects. These are the kind of people who really shouldn’t be blogging about technical stuff.

So what kind of blog posts do i like? The ones that are original. The ones that take a complex or relatively unknown subject and make it clear to those of us who didn’t know about said subject before. The ones that provide workarounds for obscure bugs we eventually all run into. The ones that offer good advice on how to solve problems we all face. The ones that discuss what doesn’t work. The ones that discuss what does work. The ones that show us how to do something. I could go on for a while but i think it’s best to summarize it as follows: the ones that provide valuable information for us to learn. There are a lot of great tech blogs out there that are filled with this stuff. I often have a hard time just to keep up with all the great stuff that gets posted.

So you’re probably wondering why i’m posting this. After all, it doesn’t really fit into any of the categories i just mentioned. Well except that technically it is ‘original’ since i just wrote this stuff… Anyways, these are just some thoughts about tech blogs that i wanted to share. Maybe some people feel the same way about it