Kirkman Enterprises

 If someone has an answer to the question that is the title of this post (How does an asocial person network?), I would love to hear it.  Twice this week, it was suggested to me to attend the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) career fair at school this coming week.  I inwardly cringed at the thought because, to me, it's a very much social situation and I do very badly in social situations.  I wouldn't even consider myself asocial, but socially inept.  I guess that can be attributed to spending much of my formative years sitting in front of a computer.  I never really learned how to interact with people.  I do fine in more formal, business-like settings.  I'm also okay once I know a person and have some common basis in which to interact with them.  However, to approach a perfect stranger and introduce myself I wouldn't know what to do or say once I tell them my name.

For those who are curious, yes, I am still looking for work.  I've been focused on looking for work in the Austin to San Antonio area to save myself the hassle and expense of moving.  I realize that may limit my options and it is a decision I will be thinking heavily about over the next week or two.  Finding full-time professional work over the last several years has seemed to be difficult for me.  I know some of the reasons why that is so (and I may discuss them at some point on here).  But there are other reasons which elude me.  The current book that I am reading makes mentions of nerds and geeks, like me, trying to live life as if there are a set of rules and objectives.  When the current objective is trying to start my career, sometimes, unclear rules are very frustrating for me.  One thing that is sometimes frustrating is the issue of industry certifications versus raw skill and talent.

About a month ago I checked out a number of software engineering and development books from the University library to read.  I figured it would be a good opportunity to shore up those areas I am less clear on.  The first book I read (and am now finally getting around to write about) is User Applied Stories by Mike Cohn.  It was a very good book covering user stories as a replacement for traditional requirements solicitation in software design and development.  It provided an introduction to what user stories are and how they can be used throughout the development process.

I should start this post before the center-piece of it gets too far out of date.  On December 12, the Austin-American Statesman published an article about the lack of people with software development and design skills in the Austin area.  It was somewhat interesting, to me, that in this article that the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce is trying to encourage the University of Texas and the Austin Community College to do more to produce skilled programmers.  A number of questions came up in my mind as I read the article.

While other students on campus have been studying hard for finals this past week, I have been relaxing and catching up on unfinished business.  Thanks to my classes this semester being project classes I'm all done.  There has been a project at work I had been delaying on to finish my class projects.  (And yes, contrary to some people's beliefs, I am employed by the University doing actual work.)  The professor I work for is not looking to replace me with another computer science student who can continue to do software development for him.

Whenever I go through a phase of updating my resume and publishing it to various sites (as I'm doing these days), I'm quickly reminded about how much I find job recruiters to be irritating.  It generally seems to me that recruiters don't care about my time or being straight and to the point in their communications.  Maybe it has to do with there being a lot of people looking for work.  Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive.  I figured that since I have this blog, and my resume links to it, I'd do a little venting in hopes that perhaps recruiters will understand why they are so irritating to me.

 I talked about this a year ago.  If you've ever looked at my resume or portfolio of work, you know that I have an interest in mainframes.  It all started in 2006 when I was introduced to IBM's "Master the Mainframe" contest.  It was only in its second running back then and only a couple thousand students participated, if that many.

 I've been meaning to write an update for this blog for a number of weeks now.  I've been happy with my progress with developing the business' website with Groovy on Grails.  I'll try to talk more about that below.  Aside from a few fixes and additional enhancements, the alpha version of our web-based application is completed.  Progress with the business itself has been slower than I'd like.  That is both a good and bad thing.  It's good, because my desired pace would likely be faster than would be good to ensure the business is a success.  Part of the lack of pace was our business partner being busy with his day-job and recently accepting a new job in a city across the state.  So, now my professor and I are communicating with our contacts for a new business partner to get things going again.  Other than that, the site itself has shaped up well and developing it with Grails has not been difficult.

 I've been posting off and on about the website I have been developing using the Groovy on Grails Framework.  Friday afternoon, I walked out of my office at school with a smile on my face.  I had just sent an e-mail to the professor I work for and our business partner telling them that I had put an early version of the site on our research group's web server.  I've come to like developing in Grails.  One of the requirements of the web development framework for me was integration with pre-existing Java code.

 As I mentioned in my last posting, I was unhappy with how Apache Wicket constructed URLs for the pages within the web-based application.  I did not see an easy solution to the issue, therefore I began looking at other alternatives.  To recap, I'm looking to develop a web-based service for a potential business that is based on a Java application that I have been developing for more than a year.  I would like to use, potentially, a substantial portion of the code from this Java application in the web-based service, therefore the framework for the site would need to be able to handle Java code.  I think Groovy on Grails may be the answer.