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One good article wouldn't impress me that much. A history of writing good, high quality, original articles will definitely impress me. One thing to be aware of - when I'm hiring, I just look at CVs, so chances are that I'm not going to have the time to read through a whole series of articles, so try to pick the best ones and highlight them for me.
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It did help me every time I changed a job. On each interview someone would ask me a few questions about an article I wrote. Now, I have no idea how much real weight it brought to the hiring decision, but it was definitely noticed.
Surprisingly, my open source project seemed to impress the interviewers far less than the articles.
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In general, yes but iif the quality of the articles written is good/ reasonable.
I did see one candidate taken off an interview list when his blog was checked out on-line, and his blog seemed to be written by someone who needed to buy themselves a clue.
Alberto Brandolini: The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
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In my experience, at best it gets you in the door. On the other hand, a few years back it helped me judge a possible future company when the hiring manager complained that he couldn't find my articles. That was about all I needed to know.
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So... I've got to beat Rocket Hands to take out more than £50? 
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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"ATMs like this run Windows XP"
I'm just gonna leave this here, and point out your financial details are going through this thing...
Alberto Brandolini: The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
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Not necessarially, and in fact, highly unlikely.
There will be a sub OS that will deal with security. XP just displays the graphics and handles the non sensitive stuff.
(I work on these kinds of machines by the way).
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"ATMs like this run Windows XP"
Well, except the ones that run Linux.... 
Yes, not a hard hack, they needen't fart around with hardware, just connect a USB keyboard though! 
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Munchies_Matt wrote: Well, except the ones that run Linux.
Man, imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
Alberto Brandolini: The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
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Can anyone explain to me a good reason why anyone would use CF outside of "it's just what we know"? Every time I see the phrases "ColdFusion" and "enterprise" tossed in together I can't help but laugh.
Jeremy Falcon
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Yeah, I'm replacing a ColdFusion site at work with a MVC site.
The database also has to be rebuilt from the ground up as the old one is so infested with ColdFusion garbage that it's impossible to adapt it to new requirements without scraping it and rebuilding anyway.
Sooooo the data in about 10 badly designed tables (yes, that's the entire database) is being migrated to a database that now spans 96 tables! I absolutely HATE tables that span 200 to 300 columns!
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: I absolutely HATE tables that span 200 to 300 columns!
Is this something imposed by CF or just a bad DB? To me when I see crap like "wipes your backside for you" I think of things like FoxPro with its oddities.
Jeremy Falcon
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Both.
The CF code does some weird things with radio buttons and checkboxes. To mark options as selected in the website, it writes a string of character values to a database field, either as a bunch of characters packed together or comma separated.
The real pain in the ass is that these fields are fixed length in the database and there's no room for new options in these lists.
The existing site was written by a bunch of different people at different times and nobody had any clue as to what they were doing with databases.
And now replacing the site has fallen on a friend of mine and myself. We're 18 months into this project and were finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: We're 18 months into this project and were finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Been there, done that. Good luck with it.
Jeremy Falcon
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: We're 18 months into this project and were finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
That's just a freight train coming your way.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I hope not! But, yeah, my partner and I have both thought the same thing at various times during this project.
We go Beta in about another 6 to 8 weeks.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: written by a bunch of different people at different times
Power users dontcha love em. The people that keep us in work. Let them kludge a solution together, let it become core to the business and THEN get a professional to rewrite and migrate the data.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Professional?? What professional? Where is this person you speak of?
You are correct as the existing site is the main system used during my teams primary function.
Sadly, migrating the data is what's taking most of the time in this project. I've got a extensible data importer framework built and a bunch of importers interpreting, correcting, filtering, and normalizing the data on-the-fly during import into the new database.
It's also being used to sanity check and test the EF model for the new database during the migration.
There's nothing like tearing down a site that's been built (badly) over the last 10 years and rebuilding it from scratch.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: tearing down a site that's been built (badly) over the last 10 years
Thankfully I only do LOB work that does not include web (until Silverlight came along) so I usually have to deal with Access and Excel (used as a database) and the myriad of redundant, duplicated sheets and forms created.
My usual data transform is a bunch of sql scripts that end in truncate everything so I can repeat again and again and again.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: Power users dontcha love em. The people that keep us in work. Let them kludge a solution together, let it become core to the business and THEN get a professional to rewrite and migrate the data.
This is why MS Access needs to burn!!
Jeremy Falcon
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: he CF code does some weird things with radio buttons and checkboxes.
FTFY 
Dave Kreskowiak wrote: The existing site was written by a bunch of different people at different times and nobody had any clue as to what they were doing with databases.
FTFY
Dave Kreskowiak wrote: And now replacing ... We're 18 months into this project
Nice billing by any measure. 
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
I would agree with you but then we both would be wrong.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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I'm not an independent. I work for the largest insurer in Michigan and am not a developer per-see by trade.
I'm a "jack of all trades" systems engineer and admin who just happens to write a TON of code to make my life, and my teams life, much easier. I write everything from simple little scripts to automation tools and plugins to entire business process applications that support technical teams. It's kind of hard to describe my skill set other than to plagiarize: "what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a " very valuable asset to any team I'm on.
Truthfully, this is the first website I've ever designed and written on this kind of scale and the first time I'm working with another developer on the same project. The best part about this project is the enormous pile of stuff I, and the woman I'm working with on it, have had to learn "on-the-fly":
MVC/Razor
Entity Framework 5 (CodeFirst)
CSS/HTML5
jQuery
JavaScript (I'm not a web dev by trade and neither is she)
Kendo UI for ASP.NET/MVC
Team Foundation Server and the nuances of Source Control in a team environment
Working with other developers
a new appreciation for the phrase "breaking the build" (we've both done this ONCE)
and a completely new perspective on why web devs hate IE
She had to learn even more, like the entire list I mentioned, ASP.NET and C#. She's NEVER even seen the inside of Visual Studio before this project nor any real experience with "C" type or OOP languages. HOLY SH*T has she impressed me with her ability to pick this stuff up entirely on her own! The only thing I gave her an overview of was what MVC stood for and the basic idea of what each of those pieces does. It's nice to find someone who's just as exceptional at adapting to new stuff as I am. She's a very rare find indeed.
I know this sounds like a couple of newbs just fumbling around until we get something to "work". I can assure you that is FAR from the case. We've both put our reputations on the line on this project and agreed to deliver the "slick and awesome" experience management, and the rest of the team, wants. During concept and pre-Alpha build presentations we have consistently been told we're delivering an experience far better than envisioned.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: we have consistently been told we're delivering an experience far better than envisioned.
Good work. 
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
I would agree with you but then we both would be wrong.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: FoxPro with its oddities.
On my short list is writing a few exports from an old FoxPro system.  Initial findings were that there was a sort of summary/detail thing going on where the detail data is stored in a comma-delimited string in a field in the summary record itself...they had already reached the 255 column limit, and I suppose it was the logical way around that limitation.  Unfortunately, this makes aggregates on the detail data (which is what I need) impossible! Even worse, this is an extension of an older import written in VB6, which was not migrated as we had assumed all customers had moved out of the stone age! I'm putting this one off for as long as possible.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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