Today is my last day at local.ch. I have been involved with that company since the beginning of 2005 with the initial prototypes. After my time in Peru I then started as a full-time employee in May 2006. That was a few days after the very first version of local.ch had gone live. So I spent close to four years involved with the project and of that two years and seven months as an employee. ...
Yesterday we’ve released version 1.0 of Okapi, a web framework built with PHP and XSLT. I’ve spent a substantial amount of time during the last months working on that release. Okapi is the framework we use at local.ch for all our frontend needs and was originally developed by Silvan from Liip. So far we used a heavily modified fork of Okapi. New projects at local now don’t use that internal fork anymore but instead the official central Okapi. To facilitate that I’ve merged some stuff from our fork into the main repository and also I’ve cleaned up the code base so that Okapi now sucks less. ...
Intel is doing a quiet time pilot with about 300 people. In that pilot they disconnect for Tuesday morning. No mails, no IM, no phones, no person allowed to walk in to the office. The pilot has launched end of August, but I only learned of it today through another story on the same blog: No Email Day (via NZZ). On Friday they now encourage not using email but instead talk directly face-to-face or use the phone. ...
For the next phase of local.ch E-Mail processes will play a central role. So I wanted to include those processes in our Selenium tests. It’s actually quite easy to do. First create an account where test mails can go to. That account should be accessible by one of your scripts. I use a normal IMAP account for that. Then write a script which always outputs the newest mail on that account. I include some of the important headers plus the body (body parts for multi-part mails). I also made that page refresh itself every two seconds. ...
As you may already have seen on our blog, we at local.ch are looking for new co-workers. If you want to be part of a team of geeks working on one of the most exciting Web projects in Switzerland, join us. We’re looking for exceptionally talented geeks. The currently open positions require Java programming, so you should already feel comfortable with that. You top it off if you already know Spring and Lucene - but that’s not required as we’re looking for people who learn quickly. ...
Last Friday we had a reason to celebrate at local.ch (my employer). We released the Guide aka Leisure. That’s the place to go for events and locations like restaurants, bars, cinemas, etc. See the extended release notes on the team blog. The data is not as broad yet as we’d like it to be. You’ll currently only find real information in the bigger cities of Switzerland. Of course we want to improve that in the upcoming months. Many other new features are upcoming this year. Stay tuned. Even better, subscribe to the local.ch Team Blog for the latest information. ...
I attended the Webtuesday yesterday, hosted by Jürg Stuker at the namics office in Zürich. The talk was mainly done by Urban Müller of search.ch about their clustering implementation. Statistics, performance, server redundancy, etc. were the topics. Bernhard Seefeld talked about his current solution for Endoxon. And Cédric added a few notes about our solution at local.ch. Silvan and Stefan of Tilllate had a few things to say about their layout as well. All in all it was a very interesting evening with lots of stuff learned. I guess all of us learned a few things. We then moved to El Lokal for a beer and Pizza. We of local.ch had to accept being defeated by tel.search.ch for looking up the number of a Pizza delivery service. But only because we don’t have the mobile interface ready, yet. It’s already being implemented, though and is one of the lacking features I personally care most about. It was once again interesting to meet a few people I had only met online so far, especially Denis De Mesmaeker and Alain Petignat. Next time I’ll talk about Ruby on Rails which I already defended at our table yesterday. We planned/are planning to have that event on June 13 but that date collides with the Swiss victory over France at the Football World Cup. Details are currently being negotiated and will be announced on the Webtuesday Zurich Web site. ...
On Monday I officially started my new job at local.ch, the search engine for every village in Switzerland. We currently offer access to the phone book but will add other services in the future. I’ll keep you posted of course! There is also the local.ch Team Blog where I’ll contribute to. I’ll mainly be working in system administration (we run a small server farm mainly on Linux) and programming (starting with PHP frontend work). I’ll also be responsible for the community part of local.ch. We have a few ideas about contributing back to the Swiss blogosphere and that will be my job. Thanks to the local.ch team for the great reception. I’m very excited to work on this project, especially knowing it since its first days. ...
It appears that the Swiss job market in the tech sector is not as bad as I thought for some time. If you are a well-qualified individual you should have no problem finding a job - at least in the Web sector. Why do I say this? Well, recently Bitflux had a job opening (now filled), local.ch has also been looking, as is now search.ch. namics has a few job openings as I’m sure have other agencies. All of them have one thing in common which was not always true for our sector: they look for highly skilled workers (though namics also has internships in Baar/Zug and in St. Gallen). A few years ago, companies in our sector were adding people to their workforce like wild and thus had to sacrifice on quality. Now it’s the opposite. I for one believe that is a very welcome change and so do many of my friends. But I also know a few people who profited from the “more liberal” practices during the dot-com boom. Anyway, I’ll add a few articles in the following weeks on how to improve your chances for getting an employment in this area. It won’t be rocket science but I hope I have a few tips to share. Those articles will be available in English and in German. And I suggest you tag job openings on your weblogs with the “jobs” tag. That will allow job seekers to watch the tag (or subscribe to it). Update 1: Forgot, that KAYWA also is looking for talent. Update 2: And Google also is looking. (Via relab.ch). ...