Anyone Looking For a Good Job Lead?

One of my team-members recently quit to move out of the country. So my boss is now looking for a replacement for him.
The position is primarily developing applications that run on mobile phones, particularly for Android and Blackberry and J2ME (java-based) platforms, though a background in any popular mobile platform is certainly a bonus (iPhone, WebOS, Brew, Windows Mobile, etc).
I wouldn’t say past experience with mobile software is a strict requirement. They did hire me, after all, and I hadn’t done mobile phone software before. If you are adept at picking up new programming languages and have a strong background in Java or C++, that might suffice. Other areas that are not strictly in any way necessary but might be a plus on your application: PHP, audio codecs (AAC, MP3), ANT, SVN, GUI design, databases, etc…
Current projects my team is working on are mostly Android and Blackberry applications,
especially Android at the moment. If this is the kind of job that interests you and you
don’t have that background already, go over to Google’s android developer site and start reading up on the platform and try out some of their developer tools; that’s just my personal two cents on how to break into mobile development if you don’t have experience there.

StackOverflow

All week I’ve been trying to get myself some reputation on stackoverflow so I could mark helpful answers as I keep poking around for solutions to tricky programming problems I’m working on at work…but hadn’t been having much of any luck with trolling around the site to find open questions to answer that weren’t extremely difficult questions or outside areas of my expertise. But then today, when I was poking around on there, thought I’d try answering a couple, and actually stumbled upon a question that while I wasn’t sure I had the *right* solution I had a partial idea what was wrong and what I’d try to fix the problem, and left a comment suggesting my idea, and then a couple hours later, whoa, when did I got from reputation of 3 to reputation of 28? Go back and look, and apparently my hunch turned out to be right on and just what the guy needed to solve his problem so he’d approved the answer and voted up the answer giving me reputation points for each of those actions. So I was excited about that.

And this was kind of random funny coincidence too, but when I was poking around on the site–they have this feature called badges, and when I was poking around on the site, I happened to notice a username that sounded awfully familiar, and so I clicked on it, curious whether it could be my college classmate Mike or not, and sure enough, the personal info in the profile matched up. And for bonus funny random points, it looked like he’d created his account near the same time I did (like as in within the last week?) from his profile.

Bugzilla

Does anyone have anything to say about whether upgrading Bugzilla 2.x to the latest version is a major pain in the ass or totally worth it? We’re still using that “dinosaur” version at work, and I’m sure we’re missing out on all kinds of improvements and cool features and usability improvements, but the question remains, is it worth the headaches of upgrading?

Team Lunch

We had a team lunch today since G. (a product manager who mostly works off-site with customers) was in town, to celebrate the re-release of the product I’ve been working on. We went to this Brazilian restaurant in downtown. It was kind of fun, nice to get out of the office too. I really need to get a recipe for those Brazilian cheese bread balls; they are so good. I remember thinking the same thing when I went to my Brazilian au-pair friend D.’s Brazilian theme party too. Yum Yum.

Work is moving along, getting into documenting things to pass off to the porting team, which means going back and writing a lot of additional documentation. It’s nice to get the chance to do that, and quite satisfying in moderation, but after a while can get kind of tedious to do for long hours straight…maybe its a good thing its Friday!

Busy Time

Things have been really crazy and busy at work this week…we’re trying to get a release out the door by the end of this week, so a lot of extra stuff that needs to get done in between…I’ve been at work late every day this week, but then again, maybe that’ll works out even since I’ll need to leave early next Friday to go camping.

Pizza

At work we’ve had pizza twice this week. Its actually been perfect timing both times too, because it was on the exact days I had no idea what I was going to do for lunch and hadn’t brought anything and figured I’d have to go pick something up. One of the pizza lunches was a thank you for a bunch of us assisting another project team, and the other was celebrating the end of an office weight loss challenge.