Peter Pilgrim :: Java Champion :: Enterprise Blog

#DontFallForThisOne

This arrived is my Gmail inbox this afternoon. I had heard that some people were getting these mails; but I didn’t believe them until now.

charles <charlesbrown486@yahoo.co.uk>

14:36 (22 minutes ago)

to me

Hi

As a result your application, I would like to invite you to attend an interview. 
You will have an interview with the department manager, Edie Wilson. 
The interview will last about 30 min.

Please bring three reference (If available), as well as a copy of your ID, 
e.g. Passport, Driving License to the interview.

Please contact me on 07064848730, in order to arrange an interview. 
We look forward to seeing you

Best regards
Charles Brown

You’re having a laugh. Seriously, I am laughing. This is obviously a job interview scam, although you might not think so if you are very new to IT industry. In this country (United Kingdom and Ireland), you don’t need to provide any references up front for work before a face-to-face interview in this country and anyone that asks you to do so is taking you for a ride. References and sometimes disclosure checking, though, are usually required when you have been made a fully legal job offer from a reputable entity company. Don’t give skimmers, clippers, in-between cheap labour force so-called here-today gone-tomorrow consultancies or confidence tricksters any glimmer of a chance and naturally any money.

BaLeeTeD

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I have been going through my photographs from my October 2011 California trip. It is time to share and poke life. (See below for Dennis Ritchie)

Here’s a guy that revolutionised the computer industry, the music industry, the motion picture industry, the telephone industry. There’s four, and maybe more. That’s impact.

Robert Cringely

“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is [just] the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, and save a little money.”

“That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around that you call life, was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that you will never be the same again.”

“The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually …you can push it in, something will pop out [on] the other side. You change [it], you can mould it. That’s maybe the most important thing.”

Steve Jobs, 1994

He’s going to inspire a whole new generation.

Will.i.am, The Black Eye Peas

San Francisco Apple Store: “Hey Steve. See you around ok? Hopefully not soon. Thanks”. As Steve Jobs himself stated in the Reed College address that even people who want to go heaven, don’t want to die to get there.

Emotions run high at the Apple Store, San Francisco. People do care and empathise with former CEO and Chairman of Apple.

Memorials for Steve Jobs at Apple’s San Francisco store on Thursday 6th October 2011, the last day of JavaOne conference.

I wrote two and drew my post-it notes as a personal tribute. I did it in the evening on the way to dinner and walking back to Villa Florence Hotel.

Poignant tributes that existed until 7th October 2011, until a violent hooligan lost the plot, and vandalised the people’s memorial. [The vandal voiced his ire, "What did f**king Steve Jobs ever do for me? I am f***ing poor and an American. This f**king computers are expensive! I can’t afford them! F*** Steve Jobs!"]

A lone candle burns on the street corner in SF

Tasteless or tact? I was reminded of our own Princess Diana’s sudden death in 1997. The irony was this similar brood affair was taking place in California, whilst I was attending, and speaking at a JavaOne conference. It was not lost on us, that we human do care enough, and we were sorry for Steve Jobs passing. I think this is what the focus on user experience and putting the user first can ultimately give you.

The British have a Royal family, so it was peculiar to see such an emotional event taking place in America. What is fascinating is that the respect and the time all of the onlookers took I to write their post-it notes. Where as the former HRH and Princess of Wales had lots of beautiful and oftentimes deep sentimental floral tributes strewn outside Buckingham Palace, much of it sadden a national by such unexpected loss. This time it was the tech aficionados of the entire world made the Apple Store’s nearest to them as places of homage and peace. Many of post-it notes were written by tourists, travellers, and conference attendees, in foreign languages in San Francisco and everyday fans of one or the other Apple consumer products, and the murals were all eloquent. I also never expected Steve Jobs to pass so suddenly, I too thought that he had a lot more time than he had. I for one will always remember this significant JavaOne conference and my time in America.

Overall, October was a sad time also for the passing of Dennis Ritchie, who co-created the programming language C and helped build the foundation of the modern day UNIX operating system. If Steve Jobs was uber important, then Dennis was a mega important. Without his insight in to turning out a easier programming language than, the then, assembly code, then we would still standing still in the dark ages of computers software engineering practice and methodology. Dennis Ritchie foresight was all of our gain. The turning of the tide. It was his creation of C the programming language that influenced Java the programming language and, of course, Objective C the lingua franca of Apple’s iOS native platform, through its popularisation under Steve Job’s NeXT operating system NeXSTSTEP. Other strands of that tree of C inspired Bjarne Stroustrup effort with C++ ( C with classes) and thus ushered in the field of Object Oriented Programming to the mainstream.

Both Steve Paul Jobs and Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie will be missed.

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One of the greatest technology leaders that ever lived and probably ever walk this earth. RIP Steve Jobs, Apple Chairman and former CEO http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/ ( Applause ;-D *)

Hewlett Packard –> Atari –> Apple –> Next –> Pixar –> Next –> Apple

Quotes From Commencement Speech at Reed College

“Sorry to be so dramatic: but your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking

“Most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

“Be insanely great.”

How Steve Influenced My University Days

It was now a time ago, in the late 1980’s when I attended London South Bank University. Whilst reading my the later half of my Science Computing degree, I wrote many assignments on an expensive colour Apple Macintosh IIgs computer in the, then, very dignified department only, computer lab. Especially, I loved the black and white user interface of Macintosh. It was a light years ahead of the MS DOS based IBM PC compatibles of the time. The tool of choice was WordPerfect, a proper word processing application. In those heady days, Apple Mac computers were prone to viruses and infections, and hackers even then, which meant that the administrative department gave out special 3.5 disks with a Disinfectant program.

The experience of the earlier Mac user interface, Windows Icon Mouse Pointer, borrowed from the seminal research of Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, lead to my early interest in user interface programming. If Steve Jobs had not gone for perfection, pushing his knowledge of art design, calligraphy, his philosophy, I never would have viewed this technology at university. The first impressions of a beautiful user interface, graphically proportioned and in colour for the day, left me great thoughts about a career in programming graphics and software development.

Those first impressions of quality business application with graphic user interface were not lost on me.  It lead to a job programming years later in the 1990s, on SunOS 4.1 workstations and X Windows / OSF Motif programming. Although, I never got to develop HyperCard applications ( I had no interest in that technology and there was too much work to be done on other bachelor degree assignments), the inspiration of the user interface, the slickness of the user experience left me wanting more. I took some of these inspirations also to Borland Turbo Pascal programming on MS DOS as part of the final project of my degree.  

About the time of my finals, I think in 1989 or 1990, I read two biographies one was about Bill Gates and other was about Steve Jobs. I borrowed both books from the South Bank University library. I am very sure that the latter was called The Journey is the Reward, which was published in 1987 and written by Jeffrey S. Young. It was a fascinating read and really engrossing story of Steve Jobs’ earlier career. I remember the chapter called Lobotomy, where he was ousted from the computer company that he had co-founded in 1976. On the day that he was chucked out, I think Wozniak and some other staff members were worried about his state of health and mental stability, and they cared enough. They made sure that he was ok. Steve Jobs lived quite frugally, in fact, walked bare feet in his earlier life, and lived on his own, in a big house in the valley. They need not have worried, because Steve Jobs, was never ever going to top himself. He dusted his self off, over a couple of months, and then founded NeXT computers, and helped John Lasseter create Pixar Animations.

Reading that the story of never-say-die in 1989/1990, being adventurous, being a hippie, and traveling to India, and then watching and reading to his commencement speech at Reed College in 2005, yesterday, I definitely felt touched, and inspired today and back then.  Especially right now, today, as I reflect on the “down” periods of my life. It made me say, “So bloody what! If these other people do not understand me now. It is more important that I understand myself.” That was the core message that should never be buried, lost in the ether, a lost signal in random white noise, or be enveloped by other people’s agendas. Steve Job’s core message deserves be sticky.

Stay true to your own goals, because you only have one life. Ever. And it is a precious one. One.

Miscellany

New story UK on the BBC Link

*In Italian Football, at sports ground, traditionally the fans clap instead of stay silent in order to show a mark of respect. I like this.

Watch the CNN tribute to Steve Jobs on YouTube

Business Insider published 13 most memorable quotes from Steve Jobs

The iPhone Dev Team [a group of international socially responsible hackers] who unlocked and jail broke the firmware for iPhone in various generations 1G,3G,3GS put a simple tribute on their blog

(spelling and grammar *PP*)

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In the first three weeks of July, I was super-busy, so The Collective Summer Camp UK had to take a backseat while I sorted out stuff. I am still pushing on with this event. I believe definitely that we should have this style of event happening in the UK. We have create the flaming green shoots of recovery somewhere in this land of Great Britain. We have be just the drivers and make sure that as software developers and designers make it happen!

I have no venue yet, but there are plenty of people really interested in taking part in a open-space conference and dojo combined all-dayer. I aiming to get a date of Saturday, 6th August 2011 in central London at the time of writing.

In the last weekend just gone, I created a Google Site Collective Summer Camp UK. The rewards are greater than the sum of parts, it would be great to crowd source some of this effort. Contact me directly please.

Register you interest here on this Google Form. The more people we have the more we can definitely push.

Weeks ago I brushed off my Wacom tablet and set about with the art in Adobe Illustrator. The logo features sun rays beaming through the sky. Notice there are no clouds in the sky to block the energy of Sun or mar our joy. It’s a new day. I believe rather that this symbology is exactly what we need in this world, today. Bloody hell! The least we can do in this life is improve and change the future outlook with education, finding the next direction, and learning new skills.

We are The Collective and we are busting loose, I guarantee it.

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@peter_pilgrim: Ow! I watched panorama via the iplayer finished at fifty http://tinyurl.com/3dm2yzn and the future  prospects were bleak

@imccaffery: @peter_pilgrim i know the future is bleak i was on the programme

British Television viewers are probably very familiar with Panorama, the investigative journal program on the terrestrial  BBC ONE TV. I watched this program using the iPlayer [sadly only available to the UK - This is the UK link to watch the episode on BBC iPlayer site]. The episode was called Finished at Fifty, and followed four individuals who were aged 50 or over as they attempted to find employment. The 30 minute programme included Lord Digby Jones, a former business leader, who volunteered his advice for free to the four individuals. Some of the advice was about changing career, other advice was to refresh the approach to job hunting, the other bits were uncompromising.

I found this report, Finished at Fifty, to be one of the most alarming looks into UK job market. I found it difficult to understand why people are labelled by business and society finished in their middle ages. I am not old enough yet to be in this upsetting age bracket, but I know plenty of people who are, and also the future prospects for all are being squeezed.

On the one hand, we have young graduates from university, who are struggling to find that very first job and with the other hand, industry is behaving in ageism way. Hence the twitter call in the first section of the article. I tweeted my feelings and empathy about prejudices against older people, and it was Ian McCaffery, one of the individuals from the Panorama report, a former bar manager, who lived in Salford, near Manchester, who got back with a response.

I know the future is bleak, I was on the programme – Ian McCaffery,

You may wonder what this article has to do with information technology. It all has to do with future technology (#futuretech) and I think it is just plan wrong.

• Our industry is based on information processing and knowledge workers, if we start to prejudice against older and younger workers, then ultimately we are going hurt our future innovations. We are focusing on a select band of population and that is not morally right or fair.
• Our information technology is relatively young in comparison to the field of modern civil engineering and even younger than to architecture and medicine, which have been going for thousands of years.  We still do not know exactly how and what we can do yet. Why should we cut our nose off to spite our face? Surely good wisdom and experience has to be great for IT.
• If older people are going to be treated this way, then it probably means we need to look back to the bad practices of the early industrial revolution of 200 – 250 years ago. Workers had poor rights, conditions and guarantees of employment. Are we in a democracy not repeating this troublesome path with information workers?
• As science progresses and we are living longer, I think we need to find a way to value experience and older engineers, developers and designers as a asset and not a liability. Our society has to support sustainable employment for all of its people and not just the few.
• The idea of an exclusive set of only the privileged is a partial reason why so much of the contemporary world is upset with the banking industry in general and the idea of banker’s bonuses for the only very top performers. (Not all employees who work for investment bank get huge bonuses.) Knowledge should not be exclusive to the few, that is why our industry invented open source software and consistently values it
• On the other hand just getting older is not guarantee for future employment, it should be about continuous professional competence, belief in continual learning and assured delivery of products to stakeholders. I believe those people who want the former should be rewarded. There is nothing in that latter sentence that suggests that younger or older people cannot deliver value.

I believe you can be software developer until you are late in life. Our industry is about learning, let it remain that way please.

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The market is dead. The brief flurry of activity in January and February is at an end. There is truly not a lot going on out there.

I seem to have attracted some haters out there. Because I have been pushing Beyond Java, looking at innovation beyond Java the programming language, many folk seem to be upset about this. The next time you see me, please feel free, if you want to cross the street and walk on the other side of the road. I see you though. Of course I can see you creeping and scurrying in the dark alleys of tech town. I simply do not have time for minds full of hate. However you have a right to choose hate for your heart. It is sad, but true.

Here is the news: Innovation will be happening whether you like it or not. You may not be agreeable to it, or it might actually believe that Beyond Java is too risky for you or you cannot afford it now. This moving feast is happening and it is on the road. Tough.

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Today, I was at the wonderful and fabulous QCon London conference at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre. It was an absolute privilege to be there again. This is probably the best developer event in London aimed at corporate and professional engineers. I met some great people today, networked with a couple of German engineers from TimoCom Duesseldorf Germany Daniel Temme and Christian Kellner, Simon Brown from Coding the Architecture, Ade Oshineye from Google Open Social, Wendy from Skillsmatter, and of course Geeta Schmidt from Trifork/QCon. I will alway shout out Juan Germano, hailing all the way from Buenos Aires, Argentina; Kresten Krab Thorup from Trifork and Floyd Marinescu from QCon USA. I arrived in the afternoon hoping to represent the Java community and especially in my capacity as panelist at tomorrow’s Java Community Process session.

I feel humbled by the whole experience and proud that such an event happens in my home town, London.  Yes I made bad errors in technical leadership. Yes I have made errors sometimes in judgements. Yes I made views known to a wider community. Yes I have chosen to express my view and controversial that may be to you or the others reading this blog. Yes I fully take responsibility in ideas and you know what? I am human and I am not just a dancer [The Killers, album, Day and Age; track: Human ]. I usually learn from my mistakes, I can eat humble pie, what about you?

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Thursday 4:50PM March 11, 2011 is the date and time. Location is the Rutherford room at Queen Elizabeth II Centre. The occasion is QCon London 2011 conference. I will be joining the Patrick Curran, of the Java Community Process (The JCP) in a panel discussion. Patrick Curran is the chairman of the JCP, works in the program management office there of the organisation. I think we will joined by Ben Evans and Jerome Dochez.

Actually I wanted to ask you dear humble reader of this Enterprise Blog what questions do you have for the JCP? What were your problems in the JCP? What is in your opinion currently good and bad about the JCP? What do you want the JCP to become?

Tweet Me: peter_pilgrim, Email Me: peter –dot- pilgrim at gmail dot com

PS: I will be the QCon London 2011 Thursday all day and hopefully Wednesday afternoon if all goes to plan.

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I have been slack in my technical leadership [blogging, audioboo recording, community output]. I know. I feel bad about it. I wonder what the future holds. It has been a frustrating time. I think many organisations lie about their needs and /or some really do not know exactly what it is they truly want as requirement. The left hand seems to be confused by the right hand or vice versa. Today I spoke to [DELETED]. It seems that the job market is a bit slow again.

Just the other day, I thought of becoming recluse, withdrawing my involvement from the Java community to an absolute minimum. I feel that the times are definitely becoming much harder, the participation into hardened group of minds a lot harder to foster, and this is my feeling again just one week after the Java Posse RoundUp 2011. What would be the grand achievement of another reclusive engineer? Bugger if I really know. I believe that I put a lot into the community from 2004 to 2010 and then the crunch came and hit me hard personally late last year. I handed out more JRebel and IntelliJ licenses that I can remember at the JAVAWUG and it was great to award the prize draws; and yet the sum total of rewards are muted. My spirit has waned. Outside of work the community went great guns. It was fantastic, I thought, to see a wealth of technologies and speakers from around the world and local to the UK. Yet inside the workplace, the so-called businesses, where I worked, the knowledge of upbeat external Java community had no traction at all. When I mention Java community, the response that I received was: “so what?”.

The great networking facility in which I originally envisaged as a way of making a job search a breeze never really appeared during the life of the JAVAWUG. It was if there, I never quite saw this vision. Instead I witness an invisible shield preventing collaboration, prevent the people from being involved with each other. It was if business had each and every single engineer’s neck down on a chopping block.

Software engineers: our self-value , our self-worth is weak, our power is weak. WE ARE WEAK AS FUCK. WE DON’T HAVE ANY MUSCLE WHATSOEVER. As software engineers we are very broken apart, split and separated from others in our field. There is no unity, there is no soul and my mind and body does not want this at all. Are we willing change it? Ruddy hell no.

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As I write this early in the morning I am really tired on being on the back side of what counts as information technology. Recently a friend asked me to simple two questions. I could not give a satisfactory answer.  The questions were why are you (as in me) not yet a manager of a team? Why are they no black people who are senior managers in banks? I could not answer without embarrassment and a bittersweet taste of foreboding of the excuses that I was about to make to the individual. In fact I was confused, disappointed and then suddenly very annoyed by the questions. Emotions ran high, as blurted out a weak answer, that I consider myself more technical and an engineer type rather than a manager. Okay I thought, I can clearly talk about my personal situation. The second question left me vacant of expression. I could not answer it at all.

Listen to AudioBoo: Black People Will Never Be Promoted

Through my own eyes, you see, I have certainly met plenty of black people working in IT, inside investment banks, for over my 13 years of experience in the City of London and the  Docklands. During that range of times I have met many Afro-Caribbean, Afro-North-Americans, Afro-South-Americans, and just Africans. However you are unlikely to see an abundance of smart and intelligent black people in the London work place. Much of this is down to simple city and national demographics.  In the capital city, London, whose population is 7 million people. Black people would count statistically as a one in ten. Inside an investment bank it is safe to say this is 1 in 100, thus we are few and far between.

However it is not the demographic the ratio that upsets me. The job titles of have been depressingly non-inspirational such as PC Support, Oracle Database Support, IT Support, CISCO Phone Engineer, Hardware Support, Network Administrator, IT HelpDesk, Quality Assurance, Systems Tester, etc. .. I think I have met one other Black senior developer in my 13 years of investment IT software development.  I cannot recall from memory any one in my career path, who has been a Software Architect, Team Manager, Line Manager or Technical Leader.  Most of black staff, therefore, which I have witnessed in 13 years, have been in the non-creational roles. In other words they have not been typically software engineers or developers. Why is that so?

Where is these other notable Black engineers, designers and developers? And where is that other inspirational leader? It may be just because we are missed each other in engagements, yet, in the square mile. Maybe they have been working in C# and Microsoft Dot-Net, or perhaps they have been working in another investment bank completely opposite to my the one I was involved during any time in a decade.

During my time in banks and IT, whilst I can take away five years of contracting, 2003-2008, I never witnessed a promotion of a single black individual of note inside Information Technology inside an investment bank. In many of the institutions, the company sends emails, memos and announcement of senior management personnel who received promotions, I cannot recall one with a black person. Maybe I was blind to it or did not pay attention.  Tell a lie, I can remember one senior manager, three staff levels above me, however only just one. He was Black and definitely African.

The source of my chagrin was the question that I could not affectively answer without deep resentment about my profession:

Technical versus managerial career path – the fact that software creation people, technical engineers do not have path to follow

Poor excuses about our communication skills – the fact that black people are continually being put or marked down for poor communications

• Lack of influence of external vectors – the fact that being involved in the external community outside of work, e.g. running a user group, building a network has had little effect
• Lack of evidence of improvement – the fact many of those Tech Support, Help desk people are not in upper echelons of management. Surely one would expect a black Head of Operations IT or Head of Networking Administration by now if most of us Black person are in non-creational roles?
• Lack of training – the fact we are black people, non-blacks are offer more opportunities on external training courses by their white managers. In other words trying to getting training is like getting blood from a stone.
• Talking a good game – the investment banks talk a good in diversity, they over promise and seldom deliver
• Lack of coaching and mentoring – the fact with hardly any black technical leaders in town, inside investment banks and their IT operations systems infrastructure, we do not see chances of being coached or to do the coaching with the approval of the (white) senior management of such organisations.

For this very reason, I found solace outside the banks, contracting paid for JavaOne, Devoxx and other conference tickets, hotels and flight. It is also obvious to me that creating the JAVAWUG (a Java user group) allowed me explore roads and discuss technology outside the organisation. Consequently, I do not believe that black people with ever be promoted or rewarded satisfactorily, especially in this new decade. Sad,  but true. 

ADDED 01/Feb/2011: Some one pointed out that many IT developers tend to be (post) graduates, they have at least one university degree or an equivalent HND BTEC qualification, and therefore they were surmising that, in any case, only small ratio of graduates can be black against the whole populace of available qualified folk. I would contend there are enough black graduates out there and for precisely all of the reasons that I alluded to in the above blog, they might be deflected from pursuing a software development (technical) career. I am also at large, on the bench, in between contracts and gigs at the time of writing.

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