My Tech Recruiting Rants - Get a Job

Free Advice...Use as directed.

For those who are in need of employment or looking to upgrade to a newer model job please keep a few things in mind. We have all heard the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” and that is certainly true in some cases. Careers are about networking. Everything can be broken down as a system and make sure you are working the system, not fighting it. I have put a few ideas here to help those looking for advice. In this case much of what I have covered pertains to the tech industry, this is what I know the most about so if you don’t agree, just make some comment below and correct me. I am not going to cover interviewing either. Just do your homework about the company and dress nice.

If you think you are the only perfect candidate for a position…you are very wrong. Plenty of other people applied for the same position. Finding a job often starts with a reply to a posted position on a job board and here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Your efforts as a job seeker give insight to your efforts as an employee. Spend the time to type (or copy and paste) a cover letter. Most likely it will not be read, maybe glanced over but probably not read through entirely. Consider how many resumes someone will need to read through, and remember that the company’s end goal is to find someone to fill an opening not learn your life story. Why bother? Because it shows effort and no one wants to hire someone so lazy they won’t type/paste a cover letter.

2. Your resume is your primary piece of marketing material so make it count. Here are a few sites with information on assembling a quality resume and cover letter. They spent the time to make these sites so I will not go into detail here.
www.resume-resource.com/
www.technical-resumes.com

Make sure you include a skills summary, and be sure to indicate the positions where you gained or applied those skills. Also include Month/Year dates for each position. If it was a contract position mention that so you don’t appear to be job hopping. Consider any keywords someone might be interested in or searching for. Think of any applications or programs they might be interested in or that are popular.

3. Improve your odds by filling out profiles on the major job boards. Employers can search resume databases and this is where those keywords come in handy.
Dice.com
CareerBuilder.com
Monster.com
HotJobs.com

DO NOT
Tell the employer you are seeking a salary other than what they posted. If that is the case then do not apply for that position or do not mention the salary you are requesting. If a position specifies $20/hr do not send your resume, mention you are a perfect candidate for the position and then request $50/hr. Do not ask for a more detailed description of the position to find out if you are interested. You are in no position to make demands and you are not interviewing them at this point, they haven’t even decided to interview you. A company will decide if you are a good fit and you can always withdraw from the process after you speak with them.

Final Thoughts…
Let the staffing industry work for you. Submit your resume for positions posted by staffing companies and a recruiter will give you a call. Remember, a recruiter is your personal career agent. Their job is to find you a job, that’s how they make money. Let them work for you. I hope this will help someone land their next “sweet job” or prevent them from making a mistake in their job search costing them an opportunity they desperately need.

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Brian J. has been involved in web design since 1997. He is the founder of True Vision Computer Services, Inc. His recent focus has been on web applications and information systems development.

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Id Selectors in CSS

This is intended for beginners and demonstrates very basic CSS principles.

CSS is by no means my specialty but I will cover a few basic elements that can really make a difference.  Since CSS and style sheets are the topic of several books and I am not prepared to write a book here I will try cover and illustrate particular topics.  Today’s topic is adding some style to tables using ID selectors.  It is safe to assume there are several different types of tables on a site or system so I want to be able to control each table's style independently.  So let’s begin.

First our file with the tables and our style sheet:
sample_page.html
sample.css

Now lets step through and start explaining some basics.

Notice the <table id="report" for the first table. The corresponds to all the #report in the stylesheet. Now I can modify the tag properties if I want to using the id selector.

#report tr { (That would change all the <tr> tags)

#report .odd { (this controls the class="odd" property of the <td> tag to make an alternating row color background.

Now i can make a new parent for a different type of table. I use the list_table id to tell me its a list of something. The same applies here in that I can manage tags and properties by referencing the #list_table parent.

Now I have shown something very basic here. Some books and tutorials are out there will help you make some very professional designs but this will hopefully get you started. I put a few on here that I like to spend time reading through.

A List Apart (Website)

A great book for learning CSS. I bought it and recommend it.


Do a search for free css templates. They are probably not that great and professional looking but they will help you see how to build style sheets of your own. You can even modify just the colors and make minor improvements sometimes and get a great outcome.

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Brian J. has been involved in web design since 1997. He is the founder of True Vision Computer Services, Inc. His recent focus has been on web applications and information systems development.

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Organizing Web Applications

Putting Order To Your Code...

In my experience with coding and fellow programmers, I have noticed the hardest part of integrating with each other is coding standards. I don’t just mean writing the endless lines of code. In this article I want to discuss organizing the files and common practice principles that can help others decipher your code. This is by no means the right way or the best way, its merely a way. I have developed many of these practices through time and experience so these are suggestions. This is written from the perspective of PHP and MySQL web applications.

I will break this down into navigation and the management of an entity. Navigation will be where the visitor is and where they can go. Management of an entity is handled with a class that performs tasks on the tables associated with that entity. This is common in applications such as ecommerce and information management sites.

Navigation:

In my sites and applications navigation is controlled by a driver. The drivers are located at the various levels of the application and decide the path of travel. They interpret the navigation parameters and direct the visitor to their destination. The use of navigation levels correlate to the menu items. Top level menus are referred to with nav1, submenus are referred to with nav2 and so forth. This allows infinite number of navigation in menus and submenus. It will not confuse actions with navigation. A crumb trail is available using this method and iterating the navigation variable. A nav1 driver will be at the top level while a nav2 driver may be at a lower level such as a customer interface for managing customers. This would include the submenu and logic to determine the controller to use. The Controller will be covered later.

Actions:

Actions are different than navigation because they tell the controller what to do. Possible actions are add, edit, delete, list, select. The controller will perform the specific action using a model for that entity, may set a message variable, and then display the proper view.

Models:

These are not as sexy as the ones in the magazines but may be more important. I generally use a class or several classes to manage an entity. Most of the time I have a class for each table in my database and that class will add new records, edit or save changes to a record, or even delete records. I write a few public methods to return lists for pages as well.

Controllers:

Controllers do the dirty work. They instantiate the classes and execute the methods based on the action defined. The are even in charge of displaying the proper file before or after the action is performed. For instance, by default most times my controller will point to a page with a table list of records. Once you click on a delete or edit button I may either delete the record, display an "Are you sure?" prompt, or display an edit form filled in with the current values and then save those changes with an "Apply Changes" action. Our action may tell us to make a new record, I show the new record form and if my action is "Save" then I write that new record to the database. The controller may even call functions to validate data. As you can see, it’s a central location for much of the control logic and operations of the application.

Views:

Finally I want to talk about views. I use these as basic display files. They are the forms, table lists, and general html pages with a little dynamic content mixed in. Keeping these isolated has allowed me to turn over the entire views directory to a CSS master and those are the only files they need to edit. Since there is not much code and mostly html they are easy for almost any web developer or layout specialist to manage.

So that’s it. Hopefully this was helpful and you can start to organize your code in a way that can be passed on to others. Most of the inspiration was from my limited experience with CakePHP. I did enjoy their framework but many of my applications have extensive custom coding and have been easier to work with outside of a full framework. I found the need for standards more than a completed framework. Feel free to elaborate more on these suggestions. I am always innovative and inquisitive at the same time. Now get back to work.

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Brian J. has been involved in web design since 1997. He is the founder of True Vision Computer Services, Inc. His recent focus has been on web applications and information systems development.

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PHP Tutorial

PHP Tutorial: This is a quick little tutorial on getting PHP form elements and making dynamic textboxes and mapping their values...

Getting the value of a form element using PHP
Hah! Simple. Depending on your form post method…

$fieldname = $_GET[fieldname];
Or
$fieldname = $_POST[fieldname];

Dynamic Textbox Arrays with PHP

input name="field_values[]" id=" field_values[]" size="5" maxlength="5" type="text"
input name="field_name[]" id="field_name[]" value="fieldname" type="hidden"

Let me explain what’s going on here. I am taking field values and making a hidden array of the field names they belong to:

Field_name=> Field1: [ textbox ] <= field_value
Field2: [ textbox ]
Field3: [ textbox ]

On another page I want to go through those and insert values according to what value I had for each field. This builds an indexed array of values and the field that they map to. Now I use a little array function array_combine()

$combine = array_combine($_GET[fieldname],$_GET[field_values];

This builds an array like $combine[field_name][field_value]

Now I can reference the value that belongs to a particular field.

Hope you like this. It was pretty much my first attempt at a tutorial. I will get better.

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Brian J. has been involved in web design since 1997. He is the founder of True Vision Computer Services, Inc. His recent focus has been on web applications and information systems development.

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Should I upgrade to MySQL 5?

So we recently installed a server with MySQL 5.1 and this prompted me to write an article about it...

Why did we do it? Well why not, we were starting a project from scratch so we could benefit from the features without the worry of breaking something.

Before you Upgrade
Do yourself a favor and find out what was added and what is no longer supported.

Here is a link where you can read what was added to MySQL 5.0:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-5-0-nutshell.html

And how about what's new in MySQL 5.1:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-5-1-nutshell.html

If it aint broke don’t fix it. If you do not need to upgrade then you probably shouldn't. Some performance improvements may allow you to improve the speed of your application or you may take advantage of added features but if you have already designed an application and version 4 is capable of handling the app then just plan it for your next release instead. Some subtle changes may cause some unexpected results.

What I like about 5
Personally I take advantage of the sub selects more now that MySQL 5 supports them. I know views are supported as well. Haven't had to use those yet. Stored procs is a huge addition. The optimizer seems to do a better job with joins and finding the best keys to use. Using the "EXPLAIN" in queries yielded the same performance results as forcing the index used. This almost eliminates the need for forcing the use of a particular index. If you notice something horribly wrong with the explain, check the data first. Check your query and table structures second and then maybe you can blame the optimizer. Most times when I would help people, it was a problem with redundant data, forgot to add index, rarely was it the query optimizer. The InnoDB storage engine was improved and based on some bad past experiences this is good news. The storage is more compact and recovery times do seem better.

Final Thoughts
If your using shared hosting and they are still using MySQL 4.1 for your server then ask them if they can move your account to a MySQL 5.0 server. My hosting company was happy to do so and i picked up PHP 5 while I was at it. Some companies are reluctant since they are using applications to manage shared hosting accounts on servers. Unexpected results can really cause problems when you have many hosting accounts on a server and decide to upgrade. It may not only cause problems for their applications but what about all the customers hosted on these servers that built code based on earlier versions. So don't expect them just to upgrade you without you asking.

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Brian J. has been involved in web design since 1997. He is the founder of True Vision Computer Services, Inc. His recent focus has been on web applications and information systems development.

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Choosing a web designer

Choosing the right web designer is important. Here are some tips to help...

When you are choosing a web designer, there are several factors that should be considered.

Skills and Talents
Hiring a web designer for a project is not very different than interviewing someone for a position in a company. Ask the designer what his specialties are and particular skills that he is strong in. Ask him for areas that he is less comfortable with. Then determine if he’s telling the truth.

You get what you pay for
Be careful when you are deciding on which designer fits your budget. Often a designer that seems to be less expensive may not have the expertise of another. You may want to research all the services offered. Find out the design process and any hidden costs. Ask questions. It is better to ask a question and risk offending a designer than spend money to find out he is not what you were hoping for. You can often determine if the designer is interested in your project or your paycheck.

Dependability
If you are considering a web design company, research how long that company has been in business. If you require updates and modifications to your site, it is best to have them performed by the company that did the original site design. Not only will they have original versions of graphics and images used, they will be familiar with your site and able to make those modifications in less time than a new company.

Bottom Line
Get a web designer that you can build a great relationship with. Once a designer gets familiar with your preferences, the direction you are taking, what is important to you, they should make your life easier. Full service companies can be a good idea since you can build a relationship with the same company. Often these companies are proficient in a multitude of internet marketing areas and can build a strategy for taking your project where you want to go.

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Welcome...

Welcome to webtechstuff.com Blog

This blog will be updated as much as possible. I hope this can be informative. Some articles may be based on my views and opinions but I will try to include sources (which may be unavailable by the time you read the article) of some of the information. I hope this helps and that people check back frequently.

Brian

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