Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008 - (Page 12)

Developer Diaries edited by Michael Swaine Know Your Market Almir Fernandes Employer: FairCom do Brasil Job: General Manager DDJ: What’s your job at FairCom? AF: I am the General Manager, responsible for the technical and business operations in South America. DDJ: What do you like about your job? AF: What I enjoy most about my job is the opportunity to work with different customers on different projects and in different areas, all at the same time. With FairCom being a specialized database engineering company, most of our contacts are with tech leaders of projects of varying size and scope who demand specialized or high-performance solutions. DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job? AF: To be involved in different discussions regarding different projects. We need to always understand the project requirements and how different they are from company to company. DDJ: What have you found that makes your job easier? AF: To have a very good knowledge of the Brazilian market, including who are the main companies and what they do in their business. It’s critical to have deep technology knowledge and a good network of business contacts and associates. Building Your Own Tools Maarten Berkenbosch Employer: Servoy, B.V., the Netherlands Job:Project Manager/Trainer/Programmer DDJ: What’s your job there? MB: Assisting customers that are new to Servoy [a cross-platform front-end development and deployment environment for SQL databases] to get them up to speed ASAP. DDJ: What do you like about your job? MB: Being one of the founders of Servoy, I’m always proud of introducing our software to programmers who have never worked with it. It’s very rewarding to see how excited they get when they discover the speed of programming and a new world of possibilities. DDJ:What do you find challenging about your job? MB: Each customer has its own specific wishes and needs regarding software. The challenge is to mold all these requirements into a framework that still remains flexible, effective, and easy to expand. Thanks to Servoy, so far, I haven’t come across anything that couldn’t be done! Built upon open standards like Java, JavaScript, and SQL, there’s always a solution for a challenge. DDJ: What have you found that makes your job easier? MB: Since we develop our own software tool, it’s easy to get feature requests into next versions. Adam Neal Boundary Problems 12 Employer: IBM Job: Software Developer DDJ: Where do you work? AN: I work for IBM with the Ottawa lab team, remotely from Montreal. DDJ: What’s your job there? AN: I am a software developer for an Eclipse-based tooling product that allows users to create executable UML models. DDJ: What do you like about your job? AN: The people on my team. They are a blend of smart, hard workers who at the same time are fun and easy to talk to. DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job? AN: We are working with a very large system that is made up of many subsystems that are maintained by different groups (e.g. EMF, GMF, RSD, RMCS, etc.). Just learning how the entire system works together as a whole or debugging problems that cross these different subsystem boundaries becomes challenging. DDJ: What have you found that makes your job easier? AN: Networking with people. I find that knowing the right people to talk to when you have a difficult or seemingly impossible task to solve will make all the difference. Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l March 2008 http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008 Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Social Networks and Software Development Conversations Detecting Bugs in Safety-Critical Code Change Code Without Fear Continuous Integration and Performance Testing Wt: A Web Toolkit Automating Release Notifications The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008

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