Archive for April, 2008
Jonathan (Boy) Steals Everyone’s Heart!
It can be a pretty scary thing for a parent the first time their child gets on stage before an audience of about 3,000 and has the entire stage to himself! My son, Jonathan, was in his first Shakespeare play tonite at BJU where he played the role of “Boy” in Henry the 5th. He was most effective in winning the hearts of the audience through his boyish charms and desire to be honest and true to the king of England. The evidence of his victory over all the hearts came at the climax of battle when he was suddenly and unexpectedly stabbed to death! It was like the audience lost their very own child! The sighs and cries could be heard throughout the auditorium.
Web 2.0 Conference: Faster Websites (BEST SPEAKER OF THE SHOW!)
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 25th, 2008
speaker: stevesouders.com(chief performance guy @ Yahoo! now @ Google)
slide presentation: slide presentation
here’s an unbelievably great tool to help you figure out the impact of various HTML options on page load times!
ibm page detailer – shows page request over time – another great tool for profiling page load times!
most time is spent on frontend
load packet sniffer then the browser
80-90% of end user response time is spent on frontend
14 rules
- make fewer http requests
- use a cdn
- add an expires header
yslow is a tool to analyze performance
very nice guy! looks like keith neds
book – high performance websites
vel08st 20% off before may 5
velocity
june 23-24
new book – even faster websites
- split the initial laod
- load scripts w/o blocking
- don’t scatter scripts
(more)
scripts block parallel downloads!
stevesouders.com/cuzillion
cuz there are a zillion pages to check
open source
tool for quiclly building fast pages
list of functions not used before onload – huge!
Do manually using firebug
load scripts w/o blocking
example – msn.com does parallel scripts!
put script inside an iframe
decision points
- same domains?
- order matters?
- show busy symbol?
Nothing on page rendered until all inline scripts have executued!
Firefox blocks parallel dl when dl stylesheets
ie doesn’t unless ss followed by inline script
Web 2.0 Conference: Agile Development
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 25th, 2008
created @ a ski resort in Utah in 2001
manifesto for agile soft dev
interactions
working software
customer collaboration
response to change
perfect doc doesn’t add value to end user ????
no plan survives 1st contact with the enemy
principles of agile
- highest priority is to satisfy customer thru eaely & continuous valuable software
- deliver working soft frequently (weeks to months)
- working soft is the primary measure of progress
- welcome changing requirements
- harness change for competitive advantage
- simplicity, the art of maximizing the amt of work not done, is essential
- continuous attention to tech excellence & good design enhances agility – make code extensible as you go
- at regular intervals team discusses how to become more effective & adjusts (code refactoring, process refactoring)
- business people & developers work together daily
- face to face is most effective form of communication
- build projects around motivated people – give them what they need to get job done
user stories – users should be able to login
points assigned by developer
owners look @ points & decide what needs done
do not assign point to bugs & refactoring!
Time boxing (sprints in scrum) – decide how much time to do chunks
communication – must have it. Irc, IM, campfire, calls, you must enable this
daily stand up meetings (15 min max) – early part of day
pair programming
select all/delete – makes code more extensible
build & integrate constantly – automate this process! – use lava lamps!
Testing – you need a complete test suite
stupidity testing – build test for each bug u find
test driven – write test before the code
behavior driven – ?
What about doc @ the end? – test suites are the best
Web 2.0 Conference: CEO of Sun, Fake Steve Jobs, WordPress creator (keynotes)
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 25th, 2008
speaker: jonathan schwartz – Sun CEO
Role of blogging in communicating with world & employees (32K)
referred to safe harbor stmt (2nd time I heard of these this week!)
if u r going to lead u must communicate
mysql bought for $1B – why?
- they were making good money
- getting ready to go public
- synergy
- 70K downloaded per day!
So they bought leads! Lots of leads!
50M java runtime downloads/month
the internet as os
utility conputing
network – web – cloud – ???
characteristics of utilities
- transparent pricing
- substitutability
high performance computing (hpc)
500 teraflops
larger than all nsf facilities combined!
business advantage of hpc
running analytics against all the social data being collected
they just bought virtual box – download free
“the worlds largest supercomputer”
when u make computers twice as fast people won’t buy half as many. They will likely buy twice as many.
writing – creating the context in which others think
1/5 energy in data centers is moving air
movable data centers – build inside a shipping contaner!
Power is the most expensive part of data centers
power prices fluxuate
so need ability to easily move dc
speaker: dan lyons – fake steve jobs
tech writer for forbes but he was bored so he did a fake blog on steve jobs
2 twins 2 yrs old – they wake him up every day @ 6am to watch videos
I want this videoed so 12 years from now I can wake my teens up @ 6am to show them the video!
Facebook is like webkinz for adults
speaker: dash – rob cury
dash express – first internet connected gps
crowd sourcing traffic
we know where to build the next starbucks based upon searches in cars!
speaker: google matt cutts @ google 8 years working on spam – web spam
trust & reputation reduce spam
captcha’s – stopping spammers
spammers are human – make them mad! (waste their time)
speaker: matt mulaway of wordpress
started automatic
akismet & wordpress
168M users with 20 employees
monotone – dynamic creation of blog template based upon characterisics in a photo
Web 2.0 Conference: FaceForce.com
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 24th, 2008
speaker: Clara Shih from SalesForce.com
created it on nites & weekends
works for appexchange
she use to work @ google
facebook pays employees $600/month bonus to live within 1 mile!
safe harbor ststement before all salesforce presentations – buy @ your own risk!
decade legacies
70 – mainframes
80 – client servers
90 – internet
00 – social networking?
moto – no software
saas – new way
no longer owned by IT
big trend we are seeing
liveops – a virtual call center company
online social networks will enter the enterprise
crm is the first social network
$75B/year industry
relationships & referrals are key to sales
life is all about relationships!
she attended oxford
she is from hong kong
she was bit by the new salesforce security activation! (login on a new computer & you have to have access to email!)
who owns the data I pull in from my facebook contacts?
ringside – allow developers to manage a federated social network by using best of breed
hooversconnect – closed sn of cio’s by invitation only
sf 2 sf – poking could mean sending a proposal to a company
built in php
hosted @ dreamhost
now would build on force.com using apex
Web 2.0 Conference: Tagging on Flickr
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 24th, 2008
- tagging is unstructured, social, organic (they change over time – consider Katrina)
- incredible amounts of data
- 11,000 tags created on a library of congress photo project in 24 hours
- magic – inferred tags (created by a russian mathematician)
Web 2.0 Conference: Ontology – Who Needs One?
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 24th, 2008
what is an ontology & how is it useful on the web?
references: john sowa, adam pease
agenda
- problems with tagging systems
- semantics & logic
- application
folks – people
nomy – management
will folksonomy lead to semantic web?
tagging pattern
- resource
- entity inspects the resource
- applies a tag
collaborative tagging – folksonomy – social bookmarking (del.icio.us)
problems – ambiguity
conceptual domain
tag clouds
folksanomies
possible app (disambiguating)
- user submits tags
- system consults ontology db
- system displays choices (were ambiguity exists)
- user selects from choices
linking folksonomies to ontologies is a worthwhile endeavor
Web 2.0 Conference: Future of DB
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 24th, 2008
Speakers: mysql, amazon simpledb, microsoft
- amazon guy pushes – let us handle the tech details. Trust us!
- how are u dealing with your address book data? scripts & synchronizing
- amazon – simpledb
- google – mapreduce
- big vs adaptable
- meshlive is all about abstracting away details of synchronizing data
- control vs ease of use/cost?
- Does it matter where my bits are?
- Does it matter who has access to my bits?
- What about my clients bits?
- Performance, cost, integrity, security, trust
- all data in one place or synchronize over multiple places?
- Relational or cloud db?
- Note – many here using iphone!
- Will sql be here tomorrow? It will go the way of assembly language – abstracted down the stack.Data portability
Will the db be abstracted away into “the cloud”? This is what Amazon is betting on. Some don’t like the details of SQL. I think it will come down to a flexibility vs usability issue. Time will tell.
Web 2.0 Conference: Internet Future, Mozilla CEO, Yahoo! CTO (keynotes)
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 24th, 2008
Summary of Thursday’s keynote speakers.
jonathan zittran author of “the future of the internet & how to stop it”
- us 1.0 – we will all get along and if not just move west
- us 2.0 – we need checks & balances
- platforms (facebook, google) need to be able to say to the man in the suit with shades sorry we cannot do what you are asking
- we need more elements of citizenship
michelle baker (CEO of Mozilla)
- now $55M company
- opening the mobile web
- there is just 1 web
- firefox is the best way to get there
- what can I get to and what can I do with it – not what device am I using
- The use cases should be the same regardless of the device
- apcmag.com/mozilla_ceo_speaks_out_on_future_of_firefox.htm
CTO of yahoo
- Y! OS – making yahoo! More social (OS = Open Social)
- announced release of beta for developers to access search monkey
- letting users choose where they want to share what
- unifying all yahoo profiles
- rewiring yahoo to open up web services for consistent development, deployment, etc
- making yahoo more social
- open social = operating system?
Web 2.0 Conference: Marc Andreessen (keynote)
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 24th, 2008
Probably the BEST keynote of the conference and I lost all my notes! I was burning too much battery the day before so Matt suggested that I turn off my wireless and take notes in Word. That sounded like a good idea, except for the Word part, so I started this blog page, then disconnected my wireless. When I was ready to commit all my words to the blogosphere, I turned wireless back on, pressed the publish button and ERROR CONNECTING TO SERVER with the side effect of GOOD BYE DATA! Matt was quick to remind me that’s why he suggested putting my words in Word!
Oh well, it really was a good keynote talk. The one thing I recall is Marc’s latest business venture – nign.com. A place to create social networks. To date there have been 250,000 networks created. They have an interesting pricing model – advertising or you can pay to keep the ads off. Looks like a lot of their sites are alumni associations. I think GOMP will prove to be a great idea for keeping our graduates connected to each other and to BJU!
Web 2.0 Conference: Where Do They Find the Time? (keynote)
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 23rd, 2008
speaker: Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”
time spent on entire wikipedia project to date: 100M manhours
time spent tv watching = 2000 wikipedia projects per year!
100M manhours of ad watching per weekend!
Cognitive surplus
doing anything is better than doing nothing
people like to consume, produce & share
internet community watches 1T hours of tv per year! if we only get 1% shift to creating & sharing the impact will be 10,000 wikipedias!
Story of 4 year old girl who after her father installed a new HD TV was caught behind the system looking for the mouse! a media system that ships w/o a mouse ships broken!
Web 2.0 Conference: Tim O’Rielly (Keynote)
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 23rd, 2008
deep trends of web 2.0
- internet as platform
- harnessing collective intel
- data is the intel inside
- software above the level of a single device
- software as service
opportunities
- enterprise use of web 2.0
- cloud computing
- mobile phones & ubiquitous sensors – data will be collected from sensors (mac has a motion sensor – users are giving that info to a quake network to compute the next big one)
question to ask: how can we make our customers more efficient?
we are starting to treat the Internet as the OS
Web 2.0 Conference: Web Psychology
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 23rd, 2008
speaker: gavin bell
cognitive dissonance – people are now comfortable with the fact that a link on one site will take them to another site so get over it!
flow – user is fully engaged with the process
challenge people – give users something a little beyond their experience with reward for accomplishing – people enjoy challenges they can reach
curiosity
pivots
reinforcement
social software – we can have meaningful social relationships with 150 depends on the size of our cortex
continuous partial attention
human memory is associative, not linear
we remember 7 +/- 2
email is one of our primary social interactions online – tons of social info is in our inboxes
verbs are focussed on what users want to do rather than what we want them to do
focus on experiences not features
openID – sound controverial! see if a student wants to research
Web 2.0 Conference: Email as an Application
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 23rd, 2008
have you considered filing email bankruptcy?
everyone uses email
have you considered building an email app?
Tripit – name of company of presenter
created from a recurring trend – no one buys all travel products from same place – one trip but lots of sources of info (tix, rental car, hotel, other tix/reservations
forward all travel emails to plans@tripit.com
- parses the data & reformats
- integrates with other related things
- ical & atom support
- iphone, treo, blackberry
trying to interface with travel companies was too complex (technically and politically)
types of email app services
- broadcast (mailing lists – google alerts)
- cmd line interface (i want sandy, tripit, twitter – from web, sms, I’m, facebook, desktop…))
- data transfer – fickr (email to xxx@photos.fickr.com), blogger
- semantic parsing – trackmyshipments, tripit
problems
- deliverability (keep your sending ip addresses clean!) – proper dns config, use spf/dkim, privacy policy, rfc compliance, esp whitelists, bounce handling
- spam (spammers like to go fast so slowing things down in an rfc compliant way can help)
- privacy issues (opt out mechanism, listen to your communitites, be transparent & responsive)
- standards
use spf & dkim!!!!!!
Web 2.0 Conference: Moods, Monetization & Metrics
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 23rd, 2008
panelists – they know how to make money from the Web 2.0 stuff
consumers are adopting this stuff w/o evening knowing they are (tagging, blogging, posting videos, etc)
mortaza husan – ceo of peanut ads – interview 10,000 xbox users via social networks and ask them questions; work with 70 social networks
erin hunter – comScore – largest provider of digital marketing, page views, key metrics, measures use of videos on web, ad impressions, 2 million users in the network
conrad – podcast – measure audience response, 30K publishers, help businesses better understand their audiences
derrick schmidt -
how is the web 2.0 consumer different from web 1.0 user?
more interactive, dynamic, lauch then measure, “the conversation”, attractive because of the large audiences but not in control, we are all digital now
how do we make it easier for the marketer to reach the consumer – many more touch points
can no longer reach 20M users via a single event (TV Show); people are much more scattered; need to advertise on 100 sites to reach the same users!
participation & distribution
more are willing to participate
content is everywhere
what technologies are you watching?
- mobile
- blogger
- widgets
- (looking for all the touch points)
- video
- twitters
- search – does it mean brand is more or less important? search can have a branding affect!
fragmentation creates challenge and opportunity
we self organizing into common groups
makes measurement more difficult
20 years ago the average person watched 12 TV stations; today it is 13; we can only handle so many touch points!
discovery and delivery will have to be more automated (job security for computer science students!)
recurring theme – advertisers can no longer spend $20M on TV advertising and get the same impact because consumers are fragmented in where they spend their time
click thru vs branding – getting people to think of you when they need you
Avenue A / Razorfish Consumer Behavior Study, July 2007 digitaldesignblog.com
- tag clouds
- access mobile data services
- post to blogs
- subscribe to RSS
- use social network
- read blog
- viewed a video online
Internet’s reach exceed TV from 7am to 8pm (comScore Media Matrix 2007)
beaware that cookie deletion is growing (overstate reach, understate frequency) 30% delete cookies each month
16% of clickers account for 80% of clicks
“all purchasing is local” – is this true? (response to a question about globalization impact on online advertising)
Web 2.0 Conference: Building the Real Time Web (Jabber)
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 23rd, 2008
speaker: Blaine from Twitter (left 2 weeks ago)
summary: how to keep people connected with eath other real time
twitter is a good example of this real time information
Jabber – an open source, xml based instant messaging platform (basis for Twitter)
Sept 2000 Jabber.com signed a contract to provide mobile interface
what is the real time web? Social Objects, the things we exchange, writing, photos, audio, video, location, personal data
we want a notification based system rather than a polling system
“are we there yet” vs “let me know when we are there”
goals
- real time
- low cost
- asynchronous
- simple
HTTP asks the question “what happened in the past?” (wrong question)
HTTP is hard to scale for frequent polling
HTTP Ping/Push – also has problems
SMTP – too much spam!
Comet (used by gmail) – requires polling, one connection per user
Jabber – fulfills all the goals
First Steps
- not p2p
- client to server
- looks like email
- client maintains persistent connections
- it is all just xml
- 2 streaming xml documents
- addressing looks just like email
- Jabber Federation
- server to server
- dialback authentication
- explicit whitelist by default
- messages are the primary payload
- can send html and Atom
- streaming conception of the web
over 200 specs in jabber – ignore them unless you need them!
core & IM: RFC 3920, 3921
commands: presence, send/receive messages,
define bot behavior
- what does your bot do?
- conversational
- informational
- recorder
define api behavior
- what does your api look lie
- atom?
- custom xml with namespaces
rosters – let the libraries handle them until you need to scale your app
PubSub – mechanism for publishing & subscring to feeds
like presence subscriptions (tell me when xxx is online) but for data
Social Network Federation – what happens when twitter goes down? same problem we would have if the world was made up of one email server!
the solution – PubSub mechanism; breaking down walled gardens
sounds like they are in the early stages of trying to build a network of adapters to this technology??
use atom over xmpp
Scalability
- scaling is not well documented
- jabber stops working well at 35K contacts due to roster presence behavior
- solution – use components (XEP-0014); allows you to turn off roster
Tools
- Ruby: xmpp4r & xmpp4r-simple
- Java: Smack
- Python: twised-words
- Perl: Net::Jabber
- Javascript: JSJaC
- Jabber Servers
- ejaberd
- openfire
- debugging: Psi
- PubSub: Idavoll
Jabber enabled sites
- livejournal
- jaiku
- gtalk
- chesspark
- fire eagle
Web 2.0 Conference: Enterprise Mashups
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on April 23rd, 2008
Enterprise Mashups – Hype and Reality
speaker (John at ProgramableWeb.com) (see slide share to get the slides)
Summary: the use of mashups, web services, WOA , openAPI’s is growing rapidly allowing enterprises to build ad hoc systems very quickly (days instead of months); we are in the early stages of this technology; will it become the next “Excel” of business (where business users build their own web apps rather than waiting on IT?)
What – housingmaps.com started it all about 3 years ago
combine web servies into something new (consumer mashup)
- - lightweight app
- - created in days
- - Web Oriented Arch
- - internal + external services
- - done at data, logic or presentation layer
examles
- workflow mashup – 80% of 72K applications e-signed in 2 months, 75% cost reduction
- portal mashup – took 3 days to build, last one took 3 months
- CRM mashup – cleaner data & less data entry time; 2 weeks to create
- BI mashup – reduce IT backlog; their IT department said $500K to build; they did in 4 days (Audi)
takes only days or weeks, rather than months or years
bottom-up, ad-hoc, less structure, grassroots,
What is driving this?
- Open APIs
- SaaS
- Rich Internet Apps
- Dynamic Scipriting
- cloud computing
- widgets
rather than calling OS & DB apis, we are calling web services
history
- ebay 2001
- amazon 2002
- salesforce 2003
- google, skype, flickr, yahoo 2005 (105 apis listed in PW)
they showed number of companies providing web apis by sector (email, widgets, mapping, shopping, photos, community, music, messaging, financial, telephony, enterprise, reference, mobile, messaging)
enterprise mashups
- CRM
- HR
- Doc Mgt
- Conferening
- Billing & Customer
- salesforce has over 40,000 users
- 1 billion api calls/month
- virtualization
- project management
- software development (assembla)
- email serivces (exacttarget, whatcounts, verticalresponse)
- call centers (callfire)
SOA – is this the last mile of SOA?
who creates them – IT users or business users? trend toward business users, but IT users are skeptical
will mashups become the new Excel?
technologies and tools
web oriented architecture (woa)
- REST: get, post, put, delete (web becomes read/write media)
- URI’s, URL’s
- POX (plain old XML)
- RSS, Atom, JSON
SOA vs WOA – both will coexist
SOA – static programming model
WOA – dynamic programming model
SOA uses SOAP
WOA uses REST
Tool Groups
- data mashup tools – beta pipes, rssbus, denodo, newsgator, apatar, snaplogic
- scraping tools – kapow, dapper
- development tools – proto, google, serena, etelos, tibco, teqlo, bungee labs, jackbe
- DIY consumer tools – platial, my maps, popfly
- services – xignite, strikeiron, mashery, webmetrics
- what binds them together: HTTP, REST, SML, RSS, Aton, Ajax, XHTML
snaplogic – inputs, operations, outputs
inputs – databases, feeds, xml
operations – merge, filter, sort, convert
outputs – xml, rss, atom
kapow – data extraction (scraping) tool
suites – IBM lotus mashups, infosphere (the glue), websphere sMash
data as a service – StrikeIron, xignite
where will you build and run them?
- cloud app builders (longjump, coghead, rollbase)
- cloud IDEs (force.com, bungeeconnect)
- cloud computing (joyent, amazon webservices, mosso)
- managed hosting (opsource)
- do-it-yourself
Challenges
- immature marketplace (early adopter phase, much change)
- SLAs for APIs (no sla’s)
- Security
- Data quality and trust
Advice for IT
- beware of the hype but don’t ignore
- Got SOA – make it a mashup platform
- start simply
- think tools
- add goverance as needed
API’s are becoming the glus of Software as a Service (SaaS)
SLA’s are starting – amazon and google maps are now offering
status.aws.amazon.com
vendor software is becoming mashups
- business intellegence (working with google maps)
- ms office + ebay + paypal
- IBM webshere portal + google gadgets
- FaceForce: Salesforce.com + Facebook
Operating Systems – Managing Protection & Security
Security has certainly become a very “hot topic” in operating system discussions these days. On the one hand we want/need our OS to provide shared access to information, but on the other hand we want to know that that information is kept away from others. Security is about balancing easy of access to information vs keeping things hidden & locked.
The key topics presented in Chapter 14 (the last chapter of the semester – yaa!!) are
- authentication
- authorization
- cryptography
The challenge presented is that software creates an almost impossible situation with regard to protecting against unauthorized acesss of resources. Yet it is by definition the job of an OS to manage those resources. Managing demands that the manager be in complete control of the resources. An OS protection mechanism demands that the designers of the OS consider all possible (past, current and future) software attacks upon resources. This is a most daunting task to be sure!
After reading this chapter, discuss the following questions in the comment section of this blog.
- The best authorization is no good without perfect authentication.
- Why is cryptography now playing such an important role in OS security?
- On the administration side of security, it is often very difficult to find the right settings for all resources and all users. The goal is 2-fold: 1) give the right access to everyone for everything they need 2) keep everyone out of stuff they don’t need. Discuss a mechanism that would assist an admin in accomplishing both these goals at the same time.
- A real challenge to OS security is balancing the demands of authorization with those of performance. Discuss this issue and present a balanced design solution.
- Explain the exact steps a client and server take in Kerberos to authenticate that a message is from the party it claims to be.
The Machine That Changed The World
This blog is for my CpS 111 computer science students. Comment on this blog after you have seen the ACM videos in class this week – The Machine That Changed the World. The first video (#3 in a series) is about the PC revolution. One of the major points is that the computer is no longer viewed as a machine which does mathematical computation but rather a symbolic manipulator. The second video (#4) introduces the concept of artificial intelligence with a discuss if the Turing Test as well as a project called Cyc started in 1984 by Doug Lenant. The idea behind Cyc is to teach the computer enough “common sense” facts so that it can become more human-like in its ability to interact with humans. For a recent update on this project (still alive after more than 20 years) and to play a game designed to help Cyc learn common sense facts, visit http://game.cyc.com/.
One of the sessions I attended at Web 2.0 this week was about ontologies, folksonomies, social bookmarking, collaborative tagging and the Semantic Web. What Cyc is trying to do is create an ontology of all the common sense facts/knowledge in the world. What do you think about this? Is it possible? Will it help? Can it help improve search results on the Web? Who cares?
Share your thoughts by posting a comment concerning either or both of these videos. Once I’ve reviewed everyone’s comments I will post them for your combined enjoyment and educational benefit.
Worthwhile Summer of Bit Building
Posted by admin in Education, Internship on April 15th, 2008
- Do you love building software?
- Would you rather flip bits than burgers this summer?
- Are you more motivated to working with bits than with atoms? (and do you understand the similarities and differences?)
- Would you like to improve your software development (i.e. bit building) skills?
- Are you available to write lots of lines of code this summer? (i.e. equivalent to a full time job +)
- Would you like to do this from any where in the world?
- If so, read on.
The Worthwhile Company is launching its first (hopefully annual) Summer of Bit Building for college students. This is designed to fulfill a long-time dream of one of Worthwhile’s founders, Dan Wooster, to provide a somewhat structured environment to help mentor computer science and computer engineering college students in some of the finer details of the bit business.
Modeled loosely after Google’s famous Summer of Code (now in its 4th year), Worthwhile’s SBB seeks to combine the interest and energy of college students with the experience and enthusiasm of Worthwhile’s Software Development Team to produce a few more well structured bits for the Bit Jungle! (i.e. to write lots of lines of well organized, elegantly structured, rigorously tested, high performance code).
For this first summer of bit building, we are wanting to rewrite the system which is used to manage virtually every aspect of our business. From customers to billing, payments to email communication, website creation, ftp account management, domain management, project management, clock management, customer portals, resource usage, customer agreements, etc.
C# within .NET framework has been chosen as the language. SQL Server hosts the database. The database redesign has been completed and we are currently working on the architectural model for each subsystem. This will provide very detailed UML Blueprints so that the interns will be able to “hit the ground running” as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Here is an overview of the SBB
- a web-based software application will be identified and you will be provided with detailed architectural blue prints
- interns will use SVN for code submission and tracking
- unit testing will be defined and required of all critical components
- you will be paid 10% of the agreed upon amount (likely in the $4K range ±) up front – remainder paid upon successful completion of the project
- you will report to (work under) a seasoned software development mentor who will be responsible for reviewing your code, answering your questions, and helping you accomplish a success project
- on certain projects you may be required to sign a nondisclosure agreement
- all code produced becomes the property of Worthwhile (unless the project is open source and we choose to keep it that way)
- your code will be subject to code reviews on an a regular (2x/month or more) basis; to be considered a completed project your code must pass code review – we will give you plenty of feedback early on to make sure what you are building will be easily maintainable by our development team
- the size of the projects will require full time commitment; you will report your hours worked for projected tracking purposes using WebClock (clocking system for project tracking)
- each participant must submit a sample of his best C# software for review by our software development team; we would also like to see and be able to interact with any web-based projects you have worked on; please provide the necessary access information
- interns who successfully complete their assigned project(s) will be given a stipend at the end of the project. the amount of the stipends will vary from $2000 – $4500 based upon the size of the project completed. all interns will receive $500 after completing 2 weeks worth of code.
I believe this will be one of the most worthwhile summer activities you will ever participate in which will help you develop into top notch bit builders that will cause any potential employer to pay much closer attention to you after you graduate!
So if you are interested in being considered for this most worthwhile summer internship, please contact me via email.