If you have seen my resume you will be saying (^*&%$%*&*(* and pulling out your hair asking why I would add yet another employer to my resume. I feel the same way! I have been trying to find the employer where I could be with for years and count on the stability. In 2008 I was working for Castle Communications and had been with them for over a year before getting the layoff e-mail. However starting Feb. 22nd 2010 I am glad to announce that I will be starting with Nokia after my trip to Florida next week. I am looking forward to working with the highly intelligent team that they have built and I am very excited to start with a company as large and stable as Nokia.

I am afraid I will not be allowed to really talk about what I am doing at work due to confidentiality agreements etc. however I will make posts updating you of things I have worked on once they have launched and are out of the reign of the agreements.

Most of you probably do not yet know but I have resigned from Tatto Media and have moved back to Namespace, Inc.. While I am under a confidentiality agreement I cannot state what I was working on at Tatto Media however what I can say is that I was working with the latest technologies such as CakePHP, JQuery, CSS, etc to work on the products that Tatto Media has to offer. Since I have moved back to Namespace Inc I have been reading up on a completely new framework. Most of you are probably thinking oh another PHP framework under your belt… That’s not the case at all. The new framework that we are using is a Java based framework called Wicket.

So far Wicket seems to be a very nice web framework and Java is very appealing to me from a developers standpoint. I guess the good part is that PHP is based on Java quite a bit so picking up the language has been rather easy. I have also applied for an editor account on Wicket by Example so you will find anything I write about Wicket on that site. I may or may not publish the articles on this site as well I am just not sure yet. Regardless I will post something here stating that a new example or article has been posted by me.

Over the last few months I have been working at Tatto Media as a Software Engineer. Unfortunately things were not working out too well and I had to provide them with my resignation. I was able to work with some extremely talented people from several different departments and I will miss working with them. Starting tomorrow however I will be working with the team at Namespace. I have missed working with this small team of people. I am not sure what they will have me working on however I am sure that it will be interesting.

As some of you may know last month I accepted a position with a company in Boston. I have been taking the train to State St. every day while commuting to work. Today I learned a very valuable lesson about city people. Leave them alone, put on your blinders and ignore everyone and everything. Today as I got off the train I exited the State St. station and I noticed an older gentleman in a wheel chair trying to cross the street. This is a rather busy intersection and he was not using his hands on the wheels rather he was slowly scooting along pulling his chair inch by inch with his feet. I decided that I would ask him if he wanted any help crossing the street. I approached him and asked:

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been working under contract for a company called Namespace in Lynnfield MA for the last 4 months and I am sad to leave however I recieved a job offer on Tuesday that I could not turn down. Starting this Tuesday I will be a full time employee of Tatto Media. I look forward to working with the team and seeing what challenges they can throw at me. I will miss working with the team at Namespace and wish them the best of luck with their product. They have been a pleasure to work with/for over the last few months.

I am writing this to let all of my readers know that I will be temporarily offline for a bit. Due to being out of work I have had to resort to turning off the internet and going to the coffee shop down the street to use the internet. If you are looking to talk to me about a potential Web Developer position you can grab my resume from the site. It contains all of my contact details.

I have been doing nothing more than interviewing the last few weeks. The interviews have all been set-up by technology recruiters for the most part. I am finding that I am being sent to interview for jobs that are not under my skill-set for the most part. For instance I interviewed with a company who told me the position was a front end developer position. I could have completed the tasks required for this position however when I was on the call I was asked only one question about front-end development.

Have you ever used the Blueprint CSS Framework?

I had never heard of this nor had I heard of a CSS Framework. Really all CSS is are definitions so a framework struck me as odd. I was also interviewed by a Java Developer who said our backgrounds have nothing in common so he was not sure what to ask me for questions. This is when I went over my background and what I had been working on.

My question for my readers is this. Since most interviews are not asking technical questions, how can I probe for them to show the Interviewer that I have the knowledge necessary for the position? What are your thoughts and what have your experiences been?

I am sorry to all who are now finding this article, there were quite a few comments outlining others experiences however I went through a data loss and the comments are not able to be recovered. You can still see some of the comments by viewing the page that Google Cached

Last week I was contacted by First Financial USA, they said that they had found my resume on a website like Monster.com (this is very true as I am seeking work) and that they had a position for me. They wanted me to attend a conference call where everything would be explained however this is what they stated in the initial contact.

Your resume came to our attention recently and your background appears to match other highly successful members of our team who are motivated to build a career over the next 3-4 years.

FFUSA is an 12 year old financial services firm specializing in payment processing services for retail and medical merchants. Currently FFUSA serves thousands of merchants with over 100 sales professionals nationwide.

You owe it to yourself to take a few minutes exploring the FFUSA site to find out more about this unique career opportunity. We are looking for a limited number of sales professionals to add to our growing team.

Click here and you will be directed to a website that gives you more detail about the position and an opportunity to schedule a time to ask questions.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Melinda Hanson
FFUSA Human Resources Representative
805 Meander Ct
Medina, MN 55340

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few weeks I have been applying all over for Web Developer positions here in the Boston area. I have been telling everyone that I am a beginner with CSS / JavaScript however I think I have been selling myself short. I decided to take the W3Schools CSS Quiz just to see how much I know off the top of my head. I found the quiz to be easy but I never figured I would make it through 20 questions in 3 minutes 34 seconds and get them all correct. I know that the W3Schools quiz is just a simple one so that you can see how much you know and is not actually a test of skill. While I still have quite a bit to learn I think I have been stating that I know less than I do and well that is not a good thing when it comes to trying to find a job. I have been trying to be honest however I have been lying to myself. I know more about CSS than I thought. I also did a lot of reading today from a sitepoint book I have and most of the stuff I understood.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I asked a co-worker if they had an e-mail regular expression that they used all the time and the response I got was this
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=email+regex

While I have seen that site before it is designed and programmed much nicer and even made me laugh again.