So my employeer is making a small organizational adjustment, to follow market trends and to adjust to the rest of the company, making the company more normalized in its organizational structure throughout. It happens once a year or so so you kinda get used to it. This time it actually feels more understandable than before though. Not because I can say that I think it was needed (I dont spend time thinking about such things very much) but because there hasn’t really been any noticeable change since we were bought (or merged) and I think most of us have been expecting one. As always on a local level it mean less then it sounds, my experience is that it’s business as usual for us and the change is more or less restricted to the management level. This time however it has a more direct impact on my closest surroundings. The (Microsoft) ‘Enterprise Architecture and SOA’ group I belong to will cease to exist and will be merged with two other groups ((Microsoft) ‘Solutions Architecture’ and ‘Java Architecture’) to form a new organizational unit under the name ‘Solution Architecture’, and a new manager. I like my current group composition and my manager, but then I do my new manager as well and I’m hoping that the closer relationship to the Java people will be educational. I’m sure it will will turn out that it’s just business as usual this time as well. And I actually feel more comfortable going by the name solution architect than enterprise. The latter implies to much strategy and higher level issues to me, while the former feels more suited to the technology affinity that I would like to keep.
Category: General
Website moved, availability improved?
Over the last week our domain has been moved to new servers. We are hoping that this will improve the availability.
The most common visual representation of the problems we have had are the ever annoying Service Unavailable and more seldom the site has loaded but the stylesheets haven’t, comments have not been filed as expected etc.
If the problems persist we may have to move the site again and upgrade to premium hosting. We’ll just have to wait and see if it comes to that. The old saying that you get what you pay for somehow works for this situation, since we pay about $5 a month for the hosting. So far it’s worked fine, but starting this august the availability of the site became poor, which was what motivated the move. We are hoping everything will work smoothly now for awhile.
Want more REST?
I can only follow Mikaels post and thank everyone who attended the BizTalk User Group Sweden event last thursday about REST with Jon Flanders. It was a great turnout weighing in at about 80 people. According to Jon we were one of the largest usergroups he had ever visited. Also, as posted on the usergroup site (in swedish) Jon now has the slides and samples available for download.
Interviewing for BizTalk employment
More then a few times I have seen interview questions that people post on their blogs for use when interviewing people for a BizTalk Server job opportunity. I never use interview questions. I’m not sure if the market and access to BizTalk developers is so good in these places where they use the questions that you can pick and choose to get the “best” one. Here, the demand is far greater then the supply it seems. Especially for companies that might not have an outright image as an attractive IT employer. I try instead to form the questions so that they fit into a natural conversation. I suggest that an experienced BizTalk developer and/or architect can derive how knowledge-able the interviewed individual is from how he (or she, but to be fair they are mostly he) talks about his experience with BizTalk Server, which parts he has been responsible or involved with and things like that, without turning it into an interogation. Most of the time (given the lack of supply) the BizTalk Server experience is only part of the picture anyway. I’m not claiming to be a person termometer in any way, but just listening to someone and what and how they offer information about their previous engagements can tell you alot, often enough. Now on the other hand, if you do find the person to appear knowledge-able, and would really like to make sure before deciding to pay that person that far higher the average salary, by all means, do a deeper knowledge based interview. But to pull that of you really need to already have someone that knows his stuff to evaluate the answers.
Welcome autumn
Now that autumn is upon us there is no better start to the fall then BizTalk User Group Sweden and the upcomming event with Jon Flanders. It feels good to start the fall after a prolonged summer vacation with a fun event and meeting up with friends, people of similar interest and other likeminded. See you there!
I would also like to use this post to mention two other events that I find noteworthy.
Alan Smith launches bloggersguides.net, original post here. I’m looking forward to the Guide to Oslo.
Fellow Logica employee Jan Eliasen re-claims his BizTalk MVP title, congratulations, original post here.
Myself I have been on parental leave/vacation. Everyone that has or has had small children know that being on vacation with children doesn’t really mean sleeping in or sitting in the sun sipping some favorite drink or having a cold beer reading your favorite computer book and/or novel or writing blogpost. Still, really fun times – I wouldn’t have traded it for any number of posts. Speaking of which – I have several in mind, I just have to find time to get them down, stay tuned 😉
Be Logical - Notes from Johan Hedberg 