Three weeks ago, I was laid-off from my position at EBiz Technology. I really liked working there over the past year and a half. I was part of a great team and worked on some cool projects, including my first Domino web service. Unfortunately, the amount of billable work decreased and I knew something would happen.

Fortunately, someone in my network mentioned a job that she'd heard about in the fall, and recommended that I check it out to see if it had ever been filled. As it turned out, that is the job I'll be starting next week. On Monday, I officially join the team at Aktion Associates in Maumee, Ohio. I'm definitely impressed by their business model and their customer base. Additionally, this may be my big chance to get into WebSphere Portal, something I'd long ago written off as "not gonna to happen".

I'll definitely miss working at EBiz. I made some good friends there and felt like I made a positive impact on our customers business. But now I need to close that chapter in my career and look forward to an exciting new career with a great IBM Business Partner.

And if any of you were wondering, Aktion Associates supports my leadership of the Detroit Notes Professionals. Which is great because being president of the DNP is something I really enjoy and plan on continuing for a long time to come.

(10)

In regards to training, I've always espoused the following axioms:

• You are ultimately responsible for your own training
• You should spend a minimum of 10% of your salary on upgrading your skills for your career

With that in mind, I needed to dig to find out the last time I took a technical training course. The last course I took was TLCC's Servlet and JSP Programming with WebSphere 5 for Domino Developers back in September 2004. That was back in the day when I envisioned a brilliant career as a J2EE/WebSphere developer. Ah, the days of our youth...

The last in-class instruction I received was the Developing Enterprise Applications with Domino R5 and WebSphere at Data Planners in June 2001. So much for axioms!

Before I delve into my plans for 2008, I want to state that I've finally given up on having a career in Java/J2EE/WebSphere/etc. I made this decision while at my last employer, who was bringing in new Java developers with a lower title (or grade) than I had. I was hired in by my previous employer as an Officer, which entitled me to four weeks of vacation, a corresponding salary range and an invitation to the annual Officer's meeting. The Java developer positions available had a title of Technical Associate. Technical Associates were a grade below an Officer, receive only two weeks of vacation a year, had a lower salary range and are not invited to the Officer's meeting. I figured that if I needed to take a demotion in order to get my dream job, the job probably isn't worth it.

Anyway, I decided that next year I would take advantage of the technical courses being offered by the community colleges in my area, namely Schoolcraft College. Now that I'm no longer pursuing a Java-related career, I figure I'd learn more about the Microsoft technologies that are seemly taking over the world. Schoolcraft currently offer introductory courses in ASP.NET and VB.NET that cost around $300 in tuition and fees. Unfortunately, my son will be having surgery in January and will be in a cast for up to eight weeks afterwards. So I probably won't take a class until the summer or fall semester.

Until then, I'll look to upgrade my PCLP (or whatever they call it these days) to V7. I'll blog more about certification later.

(0)

I can't believe that I've been at EBiz Technology for four months already. It still seems like almost yesterday that I left Comerica Bank for a return engagement in consulting. Time has really passed quickly at my new job because I typically have spent 99% of the time on average working on projects. Sure, I miss the down time I had with my previous job, but I'd much rather spend my time programming than trying to figure out what's happening next.

Last week, I created two Domino web services. I know, I know, this is probably old news for many of you who've been using Notes 7 for the past two years or whatever. Still, I have to say that IBM/Lotus did right by us humble Notes/Domino developers when they added this capability to Notes/Domino. I'll discuss my impressions of the Domino web services implementation in a future blog.

2008 will mark my thirteenth year as a Notes/Domino developer. My career in Lotus Notes started out innocently enough back in January 1996. I was hired by Perot Systems to help customize a Notes-based QS9000 application called QSxPERT for Kelsey-Hayes, an automotive supplier. (After several years of acquisitions and divestitures, that company is now known as TRW Automotive.) I had no idea back then that I'd still be working in Lotus Notes/Domino so many years later, but I haven't regretted my career choice a single day. Interestingly enough, the person who gave me my big break all those years ago is still one of my clients. Either I'm doing a fantastic job of keeping him happy, or he's the one person I haven't pissed-off yet!

So why am I sticking with Notes after all this time? Simply put, I enjoy what I do. The best career advice I've ever gotten is that when you find something you really like to do, you should make a career out of it. The fact that my career in Notes has been (and continues to be) a well-paying one definitely helps to confirm my decision! But if I didn't actually like what I'm doing, I wouldn't have stuck with it even if it paid a million dollars a year. Yes, I'm one of those strange people that has to like what I do in order to be able to do it day-in, day-out.

I'll be the first to admit that developing in Notes/Domino can be a frustrating experience. I was telling a co-worker the other day that getting complex programming to work in Notes borders on alchemy. In spite of that, I still enjoy working with the product and plan on doing so for the immediate future.

(2)

My latest project involves creating a "slider" application in VB. A VB form will slide out from the left edge of the screen when the user moves their mouse cursor all the way to the left of their Windows desktop. The user then enters a few pieces of information into the VB form and then clicks on a button to create a quote document in a Notes database and initiate a Notes-based workflow process. If you're not familiar with what a "slider" application is like, think of it as a slider window in the Notes 8 client, except without the Notes 8 client. I believe Lotus Workplace Express had something like this, where a portlet would slide out within your browser window when you moved your mouse cursor to the edge of the browser window.

I have wondered how I would accomplish this in Notes 8. When I was at LotuSphere earlier this year, there was a lot of abstract talk about pushing Eclipse-based applications to the Notes 8 client using the Expediter server. I can't remember if a separate Lotus Expediter server was needed to push these types of applications to Notes 8 clients. To me, being able to push out components to users via a central server is a definite plus. However, this would require organizations to set up and administer an Expediter server, and also how to develop Eclipse-based applications. The slider application I'm working on will be distributed to users via a button in a Notes form. Users will click on it to install the VB code and that's it. I know the Expediter process has its benefits, but it seems like a lot of work and overhead for what should be a simple thing to accomplish. Of course, as I program in VB more and more, I may be seeing things less through the IBM/Lotus beer goggles than I used too...

(0)

Over the past two weeks, I modified an ActiveX control to include calls to two web services. I used the MSXML.HTTP object to invoke the web services, then used the MSXML.DOMParser object to retrieve the data from the XML document returned. While none of this was particularly extraordinary in terms of the code I developed, it was for me personally on two levels:

1. I had never used Microsoft's XML objects before. I had heard that the Microsoft XML objects could be invoked within LotusScript code back in the R5 days, but opted to use Java for all of my XML processing needs. Back then, I still had dreams of becoming an expert Java/J2EE developer, but I never progressed beyond using Java within Notes/Domino and in stand-alone Java client applications. (Sametime Bots, anyone?) Notes 6 (finally) made it possible (and easy) to process XML documents within LotusScript, so there was even less of a need to use Java for XML processing. Now that I know how to create Microsoft XML objects within LotusScript, I wonder why I never heard about this approach to XML processing within the Notes community before.
2. I hadn't done anything involving XML or web services for two years while at my previous employer. That was quite a change from when I was working as a consulting at NuTechs. Back then, I had several projects that involved XML processing, and had also developed some Sametime Bots that invoked web services (using the Apache Axis API for Java). I had forgotten how much fun it is to integrate applications using XML and web services!

Boy, my first month at my new job has really flown by. I'm being challenged to develop complex solutions using all of my skillsets, which is definitely a good thing. I hadn't done any VB programming since 2000, and now I feel like I've done more in a month than in my entire career.

(0)

The worst part of any new job is the transition phase. That's when you have to mentally detach yourself from your old job completely and get into step with all of the responsibilities of your new job. When I joined my previous employer two years ago, I was under the gun to learn all that I could from the contractor I was replacing before his contract was up. That made for two weeks here I essentially listened, took notes and wondered when I'd start being productive. Over the past two weeks at my new job, I did spend time listening and taking notes, but I also did a considerable amount of development. I probably spent at least 80% of my time working on applications and writing code. Comparatively, I probably spent only 40% of my time coding at my last job. The rest of the time was eaten up by meetings, phone calls, waiting for decisions to be made, analyzing problems reported via help desk tickets, etc.

When I was out on assignment for NuTechs, I always spent most of my time working on code for the client. But that was two years ago. As a result, my transition over the past two weeks also involved getting used to coding for long stretches during the day. Don't get me wrong, I'll chose writing code over an endless parade of meetings every day of the week and twice on Sunday's. But I still needed to get used to working the way I used to work before I "went corporate". I felt like I caught my stride this week, though. I spent most of the week enhancing VBA code in a spreadsheet that generates quotes for orders. While I'll always have a soft spot for Java, I've also seen how using VBA to automate functions inside of MS Office documents can be a very powerful solution. Next week, I'll get the chance to modify some honest-to-God Visual Basic code. Should be cool!

(2)

of me at Comerica:



Pictured from left are Marie Still, Olimpia Borys, Deborah Olofson, Phil Nocerini, me and Saugato Seal.

Please disregard the completely incongruous date. I forgot to reset the camera's date after the battery died two days ago!

(0)

After working at Comerica Bank for the past two years, I've decided to jump back into the world of Notes/Domino consulting. Starting on Monday, I'll be working for Joe Wichowski at E-Biz Technology in Wixom, MI.

When I made the move to join Comerica Bank as a full-time employee back in 2005, I did it primarily for stability. (That and the chance to work with former NuTechnicians Olimpia, Deb and Keith!) There definitely wasn't a shortage of Notes/Domino work there, even after I tried my best to put a dent into the project queue! So while the position definitely was a stable one, several mitigating factors motivated me to look around for a new position. The drive became very taxing. On a good day, my drive would be about 45 minutes. When school was back in session and/or there was construction, my drive easily inched up to 55 minutes. And while I could deal with the long for the most part, picking up my son from latchkey before 6:00 PM became a real challenge. Also, trying to schedule other things like doctor visits or car repairs required planning them around days off. With my new position, my drive will be 20-25 minutes tops. (My friend Dennis, who has a 90 minute one-way commute to work each day, must think I'm a major wuss at this point!)

Another factor that played heavily into my decision was the desire to work with other programming languages and technologies. While I enjoy developing in Notes/Domino, and have since I started in this field back in 1996, I have really wanted to be able to develop solutions on platforms other than Lotus Domino. For the longest time, I thought I would eventually get a position working with Java and J2EE. But the reality is that most companies prefer to hire someone with that experience walking in the door. With E-Biz, I'll be able to learn more about VB, C++ and maybe even PHP.

Last, I honestly missed being a consultant. Back when I was at NuTechs, I liked being able to go to a client site and immediately begin working on a solution for them. Corporate culture seems to live and die by its meetings these days. (I remember Bill Ford Jr. referring to them as "management entertainments" a few years back.) I also missed working on larger projects. While I don't mind giving an older application an extreme make-over (thanks, Ray!), I need to work on bigger projects once in a while to keep my design skills sharp.

I decided to make this move a month ago. I would have posted something sooner, but I've been working late trying to finish as many of my open projects as I can before I leave. I always hate to leave clients in the lurch. Hopefully, I'll be able to provide you with some more meaningful updates in the near future!

(If you're interested in posting for my old position at the bank, drop me a line. I'd be happy to give you the inside dope!)

(2)