dow.ngra.de

I’m part of a small team that is developing a cool Java product. We’ve been afloat for more than a year and we’re doing better every month. We’ve grown quite a bit during this time. There used to be only one developer, then I joined the team and now we already have 4 devs.

Until now we’ve got away with most of the jokes we’ve pulled but we have matured over the period and we’re not the same young naive happy hackers anymore (right!). We still do like to throw a joke in every now and then.

We released a XML configuration file schema with our last product release and we had to pick a schema location for that. Remembering the Mozilla Ghostbusters reference we also had to reference something. And so we did.

But last week we got an email from our pointy haired boss. He had made a memo with 5 points about the documentation we have. The last point read: Why is there an alderaan in the namespace? It should be our product name!

I guess this marks a landmark in our small team, we’re not small anymore and we’ll have to figure out a way to keep the pointy haired occupied with something (Google Analytics usually does the trick). Luckily for us, we could still play the founder card, but later we may not be so lucky. What jokes have you managed to sneak by your boss and how did you hide them?

PS. We did not have to change our schema but it came quite close.

6 things you want to know in an interview — Artima has a post with the best interview advice I’ve seen for some time. Ignore the boring beginning and check out the Six Hiring Points and how to test for them. I think that positive answers to those questions warrants a great addition to your team. Although the “Are you toxic?” question is too general to stand for all people skills — I’d want to know if the interviewee can communicate as well, he can be pleasant but too quiet.

The problem with Google Apps Engine — privacy, lock-in and proprietary APIs. How come I’ve never thought of that? Oh, wait, I did…

Since the whole internet finds it incredibly important — Google now allows to deploy not only all of your data, but also all of your code on their proprietary, tightly controlled, fully integrated and infinitely scalable platform. As far as I understand it’s inferior to Amazon offering in every way, but one — it has a decent distributed database. May the Python empire rejoice!

As a follow up to my previous post here’s a screenshot of my Google Talk twitter feed:

Most likely it would be easier to have a service that just posts RSS updates to IM, but Twitter’s already there and with its great API there’s a lot of third-party services around it.