Monday, June 4, 2007

Facebook Work

Been contemplating lately what kind of groups and other manners of dancing that I should focus on involving myself with, centering around questions like who exactly is going to pay to fund my continued existence. This is not a question of depression, it's a matter of practicality!

The best way that I can think of to kick-start this process is to update my resume. I've been meaning for a long time to build a resume that allows central maintenance of both a printed and an online format. Second note here is that all of my previous resumes have been focused on providing a long list of technology keywords, and I'm not sure of the benefit of that anymore.

I have used a large number of programming languages and it is not helpful to enumerate them, as I will generally need to refresh myself with a book and some form of homework before I can successfully jump into another coding project. Also from my own perspective, I would rather work with a technology that is new to me than one that I have already struggled with before now, so a list of my own known technologies is almost a "bad seed" for any manager that might seek to hire me.

Also while it's helpful to know a lot of languages, usually programming takes place in one language so it could be quite helpful to regain fluency in at least one programming language before re-entering the software development job market. The neatest target language with the most interesting developer buzz ongoing today is PHP and the Facebook Platform API.

I think I'd better set up another server this evening and see for myself some of what can be done in PHP today. Facebook is an incredibly massive well-ordered database of information on groups and individuals, and I suspect the platform is especially ripe for data-driven applications! Lets get one started, or take a closer look at one of the applications that has already been developed.

1 comment:

Kingdon said...

What about integration with Trac and Subversion? As a manager, (or as a professor), I want to see a mini-feed of commit logs and documentation abstracts (or dumbed-down thesis summaries) for all my projects, or employees that are coders, or grad students.

This is also an incentive for coders to write meaningful commit logs -- if I might be reading these status updates and they occur with regularity, I might decide to contribute my own efforts as an interested community member.

Use Facebook as a marketing tool to promote development in new and promising Open Source projects!