* Posts by James Richardson

9 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2007

The Sun shines out of certified Java programmers

James Richardson

@Greg

No you just need a break.

At 22 you haven't got a *lot* of experience.

You could raise your profile by doing some open source stuff, get some googlejuice, or recognition on ohloh.

You could take some courses that teach real stuff - object orientated software development for the real world.

You could apply for some jobs at places that have career enhancing software projects going on. Some media and financial companies are still hiring (not always permies), I know, and doubless other firms are too - IT isn't going away.

If you go the certification route, I know many people that would put you nearer the bottom of the pile, simply because you would have to unlearn so much more.

Good luck!

James Richardson

Certification inversely correlated with ability

@Greg - Certification != Experience. Certification just means that you can remember stuff that any decent lazy programmer would look up on the web.

Experience is about NOT repeating things mindlessly, certification is about just that.

Experience is about writing decent object orientated software (as we are talking about java), not just slapping getters and setters around the place "to encapsulate".

Mind you a lot of the Java coming out of the Sun open-source initiative is unimaginably bad, so its the blind leading the blind really.

Java and Linux - an open marriage in search of success

James Richardson
IT Angle

pointless nonsense

who cares? you can get java from java.sun.com and untar it. problem solved.

in this way since before this millennium java has been running just fine on linux.

Bluetooth finally reaches ten (years, not users)

James Richardson
Thumb Up

work great for me!

reading this on holiday, sadly enough, but from buggy firefox on linux, via bluetooth to my nokia, then gprs to the web. Totally reliable, and not even that expensive. (£1 per 15MB/day on vodafone)

Mozilla pilots second release candidate for Firefox 3.0

James Richardson
Thumb Down

dont buy shares in mozilla!

well apart from the fact that you can't. you can't, at least not with etrade anyhow cos going there with ff3b5 crashes on linux every time.

Tools vendors stuck on UML and agility

James Richardson
Gates Horns

Keep your UML on the whiteboard

If you recognise that your UML should be kept on the whiteboard, and not as some uber-design document, then you won't have this problem.

If the tools don't work - perhaps its a sign that you shouldn't use them...

(picture of m$, as this is blatant case of selling products that shouldn't exist)

Civil servants still sticking unencrypted data in the post

James Richardson
Stop

Password protected

To any US readers: some part of my previous post _may_ contain irony.

Sorry for not flagging it dilligently enough and all.

Also i want to know why it was four CD's. Any decent IT dept has got DVD writers these days.

James Richardson
IT Angle

What is "password protected"

Can somebody explain what "password protected" means if its not encryption.

I assume we are not talking about (trivially defeatable) MS Office Password Protection....

Or is it more secure, like an autorun.exe that asks you for a password, then ejects the disk?

Don't unit test GUIs

James Richardson

Don't do end-to-end testing

Yes - thats right - you can just leave that little bit at the end - your entire client interface to a 'little bit of visual inspection'.

Good idea.

Just because Swing is "so simple it doesn't need testing", doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it.

Seeing as however whizzy your application architecture - the ONLY thing that people ever will see is the Swing Gui - leaving it to visual inspection seems rather rash.

Mind you - generating a UI from domain objects doesn't sound so great either - i expect it looks _really good_.

Whats wrong with just a normal unit test (a trivial example):

@Test

public void canAddTwoNumbers() {

calculatorUI.inputWithNumberButtons("5");

calculatorUI.clickAddButton();

calculatorUI.inputWithNumberButtons("2");

calculatorUI.clickEqualsButton();

calculatorUI.displaysNumber("7");

}