Questions from a school project

We get a lot of people asking us questions for school projects, I can't answer them all but since I've been volunteered to go talk about web design as a career at a local career day, I thought I could use the warm up

1. What are the basic skills required for an entry position?
I get a few resumes every week, if you want me to read it, you usually need to have built a webpage.

2. What is the minimum work experience necessary for this field?
Again, many of our applicants have already built webpages on their own, so you'd be competing against them

3. Where did you get your training or education? Would you recommend your school to me?
I have a math degree from the University of Waterloo, most everyone else has a computer sceince degree from the university of Guelph

4. What is your employed entry level postion (ie. Junior Developer, databases, site administrator)? Are there room for advancements.
Junior Developer, and everyone has a plan for eventual advancement.

5. What do you like best about your job? Why?
I love to build things, the more complicated the project the happier I am.

6. What do you like least about your job?
When customers want to recreate the print experience on the web, with everything absolutley identical across all platforms, which we can do, but it loses some of what makes the web great and flexible.

7. Where do you see Web Design and Development within the next 5 years?
More and more useful, web users are getting used to things that were amazing 10 years ago. I was annoyed at Google last week because it couldn't tell me what book I was trying to remember from a few bits of trivia (the author has a brother in Toronto for instance).

8. What are the working conditions?
Right now it's a well-lit open concept office in downtown Guelph.

9. What advice would you give to someone looking to follow in your field?
Get exctied and make things.

10. Other contacts? (references to persons or text related to this field)
(I did answewr this, but I'll leave it out here)

11. Would hiring practices be based on grades(knowledge retained), school of choice (private/public/upgrading) or experience?
Experience and portfolio, one thing we've done is to give small programming tasks on copies of real projects (like to add a contact form).

12. Do you like your job on a whole and would you recommend this field to a programmer with stong computer knowledge.
Yup.

13. Upgrading will be steady once program is complete do you forsee any areas that would be good avenues to persue?
Use the web, and build anything you need but don't find.

Upcoming events

Dave will be speaking at "Destinations" a career-oriented 2-day forum for junior high school students on March 11th. He's also been invited to attend TEDx Waterloo, an offshoot of the popular TED series of talks on February 25th.

EcommerceCamp Toronto 3

I was at EcommerceCamp Toronto last night to hear Steve Irvine (80/20 Solutions), Raffael Sarracini, Ecommerce Development Manager, Adidas Canada, James Connell (Roots Canada), Stephen Neufeld (Lenovo Canada) and Kate Musgrove(RedFlagDeals.com).

The chatter was about online shopping differences in the USA and Canada (although Chelsea losing to Everton 2-1 on the screen behind the speakers was more than a little distracting).

As always, I was there for the smiling faces. Shoutouts go to James of datamartist who has become cash-flow positive since I last talked to him and so gets a hearty congradulations from me, and to Peter of Minidata. And an extra thanks to Sarah of m marketing.

New hire: Justin

Justin, our newest hire comes to us from Phipps & Associates, and I'm excited because he aced our new gruelling interview process (now with 1000% more coding). He's our zillionth graduate from the University of Guelph, and the third who's taken classes under FreshBooks' Joe Sawada. Being from Thunder Bay originally, he's legally required to adore hockey (we checked). Word on the street is that he passionately hates the font Comic Sans (so I might have to print up special business cards only for him).

Today he's hard at work helping Danielle, longer term he'll be adding functionality to our popular Billy content management system and hopefully teaching me a thing or two about network administration.

DemoCampGuelph 12

Trudy, Danielle and I were at DemoCampGuelph 12 Wednesday night.

Harry had something about blackberries. I didn't take notes this time, but there were a few other presentations: Compost, Little Robotsthat talk over jabber, Snapsort.com which compares cameras and JaxCore. Also a shout-out to our newest coopetition, Denise and Ian of StormwareStudios, Lloyd from the Guelph Chamber of Commerce and especially Karen Farbridge

Thanks Communitech, Innosphere, Sun's SSE Program, and BrainPark!

Guelph Technology Economy Forum

Trudy and I participated in the Guelph Technology Economy Forum yesterday. Good to see all the dynamic technology innovations going on on our home turf.

I tempted fate by assuring Doug from Recovery Force, that my backups were so good that I'd never need his services. Shoutouts also go out to
Brian from ResourceMate, Jeff from Beyond Rewards, Ben from Blount International, Steve from Ampersand Printing, Perry from netsweeper, Don from Armtec Infrastructure Income Fund, John from A.R Milne Electric, Shelley from sales fertilizer, Rudy from RKD, and Kristina from The Laudi Group.

And a special thanks to Llyod and Wendy from The Guelph Chamber of Commerce

Upcoming Events

One or two of us might make it to the Waterloo Region Web Design & Technology Group January Meetup tonight, but I'm doubtful it'll be me. Monday I'll try to make it to User Experience Group of Waterloo Region at the Accelerator Centre.

Trudy and I will be at Guelph Technology Economy all day Tuesday.

All of us will be heading over to eBar on the 27th for DemoCampGuelph. (And in keeping with my tradition of never missing a democamp, I'll also be in Toronto at the same time for DemoCamp Toronto somehow.)

New hire: Owen

Owen is our newest co-op for this term. We're excited to have him not only because he's one of the top-ranked computer science students at University of Guelph but because our team could always use more aggressive swimmers that I can talk shop with.

He comes to us highly recommended after building a time management system with Google App Engine and is going to be helping us with new media. It's my hope that as the youngest person in the office, Owen will bring a fresh and exciting new perspective to emerging technologies like Twitter and this MTV I keep hearing the kids talking about.

Update: Owen is already tweeting.

Filing Bug reports

Ideal bug reports:

Bug Opened: 11:03am
Search isn't working
For instance compare this search [URL ommitted] to the raw results
It only happens if there is one search result
The XML is being received correctly.
Your For-loop is off by one.
Change line 394 to read "if(results[0]){" instead of "if(results[1]){"
Nevermind, I did it myself.
Bug Closed: 11:25am

Our thoughts go out to Sweden

Though, like all of us, I was riveted over Christmas by news of Sweden's Giant Goat being burnt, we're hoping you and yours are having a safe holiday season.

Arsonists have set fire to a giant straw statue of the Swedish Yule goat, a forerunner to Santa Claus in Sweden, defying security measures for a third year in a row.

Police in Gavle, north of Stockholm, said an unknown number of attackers had torched the goat in the early morning hours, leaving a blackened skeleton standing in the town square.

"It's a tradition to burn it down," Lofberg said. "It's happened an untold number of times since the 1960s ... it's been burned down more years than it's survived."

Burning the goat has been a popular, and illegal, tradition in Gavle since the 1960s when an advertising executive first came up with the idea to endow the city with a giant replica of the goat, a Christmas decoration common in many Swedish homes.

Way to go reddit

Congrations to our favourite* Y Combinator startup, Reddit for breaking the world record for the largest Secret Santa.


* Ok, it's really more of a tie with Dropbox and EtherPad... oh and the sixty one and Xobni's pretty cool too.

Get excited and make things

A couple of days ago I got an email asking for a dataset I generated last year (not only am I an occasional blogger, but a practising statistician :). It feels so good to make things: decks, data, art, programs, that I'm surpised more people don't make more things more often.

Kudos to Matt Jones (via Joey) for the great play on a British WWII meme.

You're on the internet so you have a computer and the ability to read and write. Make something. Then make something else. Repeat until awesome.

(Side note, we got some good demos during the hiring process. Almost everyone with a demo ended up in my wish-we-could-hire-more-people pile.)

Entrepreneur week & Startup camp

We've been attending Entrepreneur Week at the Accelerator CEnter in Waterloo this week.

Danielle's been attending a fair number of the talks by speakers such as Tim Bray of XML fame and David Caputo of Sandvine.

Tim Bray's presentation agreed with my predjudices, so I loved it: 3D internet didn't work out, it's amazing we have the internet in our pockets and "avoid flash". David Caputo reminded us that "sometimes when people say it's a bad idea, it's a great idea" and not to market technology but to market what's being made easier or cheaper.

Startupcamp Waterloo is usually my favourite tech event, and this time it was flavoured by Entrepreneur Week. Suprisingly the change of seating arrangement to auditorium seating from tables and chairs made a lot of difference (I'm not sure it was for the better). Also, the audience seemed nicer and less critical on average, and much more willing to accept presentations with no demo.

I also liked TribeHR, which I'd heard Joseph talk about a few times before but is gorgeous live. I'm withholding judgement on TechStartup.ca until I've used it more.

(And yes this post is more than a little late)

Some interview trivia

We've been interviewing heavily this week and since we're asking everyone very similar questions, I've naturally started looking at patterns:

• almost everybody shows up almost exactly 10 minutes early (I'm pretty sure I did too, when I was being interviewed)
  
• Craigslist and Kijiji are more popular locally than I expected
  
• nobody has given me the quick & clever solution to my programming question, which is just as well since then I'd have to ask them to do it over and less cleverly (there are a few specific things I'm looking for)
  
• I really enjoy security problems in submitted code samples
  
• Some of the responses to "Do you have any questions for us?" have been really useful and might make it into the FAQ in our new website
  

Upcoming Schwag

We're still finalizing the design (and trying to find more attractive models cough cough), but any day now we'll be printing off a run of t-shirts for our newest product.

We're really excited about this one, so expect me to trickle out a little information over the next few months before it's officially announced.