Software developers can be judged best by their work. A CV or even an interview can never really be trusted. While I try to very honest in my CV I have seen some CVs that will make me double-check every claim an applicant makes in his CV. Some of my classmates of my apprenticeship would write they had a “good” understanding of C++ while they just barely knew that it was some object oriented programming language. And I have gotten requests by friends where they asked me to define some terminology. It later turned out, that they needed that to put into the CV. “Ouch” is all I can say about that. But how can your potential employer ensure that you actually know your stuff? Recommendations are important. Can they call your former coworkers and ask about your performance? This can also be dangerous though if you left the job with sour feelings. The company may give you bad ratings because you criticised the company strategy a bit too loudly. I haven’t had that experience myself but have friends who did. What nobody can influence though is the quality of the projects you publish. An extensive software project shows your creativity, problem solving skills, communication skills, code quality (if you publish the source code). And it shows that you are actually able to deliver and know the programming language you are using. All things that your employer will want from you. There are several ways you can do that. The most obvious is to implement some idea that’s floating around your mind and publish it as free software. Or you can put out some Web project. Be aware that this requires quite a time commitment, though. Something not everybody is able or willing to do. The second option is to participate in an existing open source project. Found a bug? Fix it. Have feature request? Build it. All of that is visible as well and gets an URL. Document the work on your Web site (as you now have one, don’t you?). And the third option is to make the work of your current job public. Are you working on something that could be bundled as a product? Publish it as free software. Of course, that’s not your decision but has to be approved by your boss. If you need a case study, point your boss to Ruby on Rails. Published by David of 37signals, that company is now extremely well known and produces a lot of buzz on the Web. Rails was originally created as part of Basecamp and then extracted and made public. No matter which way you choose, make sure that the code you publish is of good quality. Take pride in your code and see it as a piece of art. Actually you should always do that no matter whether the code is public or not. To some extend I have taken all three routes. I have published a lot of projects (blog directory, Swiss weblog statistics, Media Manager, Bookmark Manager, though I’d like to remove that code from the Web because it’s horrible). Also I have contributed patches to some open-source applications. And I was able to publish a research document I did at namics (Web application security). ...

On of the stranger things about Sunday’s election in Peru is a law that forbids any congregations. It’s even forbidden to have a church service on that day. I guess the reason for that is, that voting is obligatory here, which was new to me, coming from Switzerland where it’s voluntary. Many people have to travel in order to get to the place where they are actually registered for voting. If they had anything going on that Sunday, they might not go voting and rather pay the fine. That’s the only sensible reason I can currently think of for such a law. Update April 4: I learned today, that the actual reason is different. Flavio also mentiones it in his comment. It seems the law was brought for security reasons, specifically because of fear from terror attacks. The church services I know were rescheduled from Sunday morning to Saturday night by the way. ...

The conference finished a short while ago. About 30 people came and were very interested. I’ll upload pictures on Monday and will also check if the recorded MP3 files are any good.

Today we have a conference about free software in education at the Diego Thomson in Lima, Peru. We will have the following presentations: Software libre in schools (Movie) Linux distributions and Skolelinux Experiences and successes Technological perspectives The LINEDUX project Work networks For some of the talks I have no idea what they are about. One of the talks will be mine (The Skolelinux one of course). And I will try to record the presentations and make them available online. In Spanish only, though.

I personally don’t like the April Fool’s Day and I promise you that I won’t participate in this event on my blog. Just in case you have any doubts about the seriousness of any of my blog posts. Update: Though this story almost made me change my mind. And this one makes me doubt the NZZ’s reputation.

China’s president Hu Jintao offered a summit with Japan under one condition. The condition was, that Japan’s prime minister Junichiro Koizumi quits visiting the Yasukuni shrine (I posted about the shrine before here and here). Koizumi even defended his visits a few days ago claiming “still cannot understand why China and South Korea protest his visits to Yasukuni”. You really have to be blind, stupid and/or a liar to say such a thing. But let’s face it: Koizumi is not really concerned about other countries in Asia. Has even made his visits to the shrine a part of the election propaganda, using it to show that he won’t buckle down before other states. I really hope that Koizumi’s replacement will show more understanding. Though I don’t have much hope. And rest assured, I love Japan and I love the Japanese people. And I strongly dislike the Chinese government. But wrong is wrong and right is right. And honoring war criminals is wrong by just about any concept of ethics you can find in this world. ...

map.search.ch is currently the best map application for Switzerland. By far. And then some more. Urban(*) just published how they photographed Switzerland from the sky by using a zeppelin. Looks like a lot of manual labor was involved. I’ll summarize the post for you, because it’s in German: They used analog photo cameras, namely use-once cameras by Kodak. Oh the ecologic waste. The use a zeppelin. Satellites don't provide the quality and airplanes have a problem with vibrations and can't fly low enough. The 141'000 pieces were put together manually. They cut the photos, put them on A4 sheets and scanned the pictures. Thanks for sharing those information, search.ch. (*) I guess it's Urban, though the blog software only says "Mueller". Update: Did I already tell you that I hate April Fool's Day? This article was originally published on March 31 (yes the search.ch blog software also said so) so I didn't suspect anything. Call me a fool if you feel the urge.

We went to see Ice Age 2 (or Ice Age: The Meltdown as it is officially called) yesterday. I was not hoping for much, because I generally distrust sequels. But Ice Age 2 might just be better than the first Ice Age movie. I guess I’ll have to watch them both the same evening to know for sure. The movie was incredibly funny. Even though the whole thing was in Spanish I had to laugh a lot. There were two jokes I didn’t understand because of the language, though (if I counted correctly). I can heartily recommend the movie. My main disappointment was that the movie is way too short. ...

Next Sunday the Peruvians will elect their next president. Or much more likely they will just elect the participants of the second round. Currently it looks as if no candidate will get majority the first time round. The race will most likely be decided between Lourdes Flores and Ollanta Humala. Flores is very pro-business, though she claims to be more to the center than before, and Humala is extremely leftist. Though Humala doesn’t have a clear policy, because he mainly gains votes by declaring that all other politicians are corrupt and that he is not. For quite some time Flores led the polls but currently Humala leads by a few percent points. For the second round it’s very undecided yet with one poll claiming Humala’s victory and others claiming that Flores will win. Flores uses the general opinion that women are not as corrupt as the men in her favor. Many Peruvians don’t have much hope, though. I mean just look at Alan García. He is currently at third place and for some time it looked as he might just win the election. He already was president before and his presidency was probably one of the worst the world has ever seen. Knowing that he might get elected really makes you think. Many Christians hope that Humberto Lay of Restauración Nacional will get some points - or at least that his party gets some congressmen. Lay is a christian pastor and the party as well is christian. As a candidate for that party, one person of the Diego Thomson is running for congress as well. ...

It is my opinion, that knowledge management is very important in the tech sector. For companies it’s immediately clear why. But it also makes sense for developers. Being able to look up knowledge and also specific solutions in your personal repository will make you a faster and better developer. My knowledge management includes the following items: Solutions to problems I had. Somehow the same problems/challenges seem to pop up every now and then. Working code for common problems. Documentation, books, standard documents, research papers. My own descriptions of technologies (applying the old trick that you understand stuff better after describing it yourself). Description of applications I have worked with, including solutions to problems. Links. Any other knowledge I want to keep. This is not necessarily tech related. For example I follow a few countries more closely than others (Switzerland, Japan, Peru) and put news of those countries into my repository as well. And my diary is also in the same database. For most of my knowledge management I now use DEVONthink Pro. Before that I used a Wiki. And as far as I know Roger uses his blog as a knowledge repository. For managing my links I use del.icio.us. I also put mails into my knowledge database. Before using DEVONthink Pro I just put them into some special folders in my mail program. This mails include mainly good tips from mailing lists. If your company has some knowledge repository your want to participate in that as well. And if your company doesn't have anything like that yet, lobby for something. At namics it's a Notes database with articles filed under topics, at local.ch we have a Wiki. Both approaches work well. At first sight it may look like you don't profit from participating in that repository. It looks as if only the company takes value out of it even to the extent that you can be replaced a lot easier if you document your knowledge. Many people I know actually have that opinion. For a variety of reasons I disagree very strongly with that assessment. Most important is that you will never be able to put all your knowledge into that database no matter how hard you try. Most of your value comes from the experience anyway. So while you do spread knowledge and therefore make yourself a bit easier to replace, at the same time you show to your coworkers and bosses how much you really know. There are additional advantages which I will explain below. Say you document your knowledge about some obscure CSS implementation bug and put it into the database. You will get noticed as a CSS expert. So next time somebody has some CSS bug that needs debugging it's quite likely that he will contact you. We are talking job security here. Or say you have 300 articles about that content management system that your company uses extensively. Even that personal manager who knows nothing about technology will see that the company won't be able to replace you without problems. Again, it's about job security. A job is a lot easier to get if you have recommendations by coworkers who already work at the given company. I've also received mails by friends asking me about a person I knew from previous jobs or from school. Positive recommendations are easier to get if people know you from the knowledge repository. For example at namics I often got help requests from people at the German offices even though I didn't know them personally. Reason: they saw my name connected to that topic in the knowledge database. I'm sure that some of those people would put in a word for me should I try to get a job at their new work. Sometimes your articles may lead to a discussion where other people propose better solutions, other workarounds, other products or whatever. So you learn as well. And to me it happened often that when writing a short note I would research a point for a few additional minutes. And sometimes during that short research I learned a lot of additional things. The net result of contributing to the company knowledge repository is therefore that you make yourself seen and respected and that you learn more. And you help your colleagues which in itself is a good thing. Quick action for today: do yourself a favour and think a bit about how you want to manage your knowledge.