At the beginning of October, I got a chance to go visit Ruzena again. As always, we had a really good time. I was in Houghton for Homecoming and got to be there for all of the festivities, including the Homecoming Banquet and Dance. I think the food was better last year, but it was still good. The dance didn’t quite go “as planned.” The first half was kind of lame, so we ended up migrating to the basement where a group of us had our own little mini-dance, which was far more entertaining. Ruzena and I got to watch our first fireworks show together and became “siamese twins” because we were huddled so closely together because of how cold it was outside.

Omega Vortex has been feeling the situation with the economy with potential clients bailing, citing economic problems. I’ve taken this as an opportunity to look for another job, and I believe things are looking good on that front. I’ve received extremely positive responses, but a few details are still being worked out, so I won’t say more than that for fear of jinxing things. Omega Vortex isn’t closing, we’re just going to be cutting back like any other company does, during a recession. We’re closing extraneous divisions in an effort to concentrate more on our core business. Because of this, we’ve closed the website temporarily because it was only up to facilitate some of the divisions we’re closing. This is giving us an opportunity to go through with our redesign plan and get a new look in place for the re-launch. We’ll have more news on that front sometime soon.

I’ve been doing a lot more gaming again, lately. I’ve given some thought to cross-posting some game reviews on this blog and the blog at Anfiniti. I’m not exactly up-to-date with the latest games and would also be doing some retro-reviews, so my current hitlist consists of Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty: World at War, Assassin’s Creed, Mirror’s Edge, and a few other things. In case I’ve never mentioned it before, I’m always interested in playing games with new people. You can find me on Xbox Live, Xfire, and Steam. For Xbox Live: Atrophius, for Xfire: atrophius, and for Steam: siguel. Maybe I’ll have a PSN name or a Wii Friend Code to share, sometime in the not too distant future.

Things have been extraordinarily dull, lately. I should be moving to Phoenix soon, so I think I’ll start taking opportunities to get out more and explore. I think I’m missing out on a world of inspiration because I rarely leave my desk. Maybe hanging out with Dutch again will get me back on my feet and moving forward. After almost two years of living with or around people that actually do what I do and are willing and capable of having ideas and such bounced off of them, I think my creativity started to die off when I lost that immediate access to people like me. Programming and all of the processes surrounding programming and software development is exciting to me, except when it’s not. When I don’t have people that I can talk to about it pretty frequently, I usually end up resorting to more reading than coding to try and make up for that lack of interaction. Hopefully, being in a new work environment will help.

That’s about all, for now. If I stop letting myself be lazy or distracted, I’ll blog more. Maybe even about interesting things. We’ll just have to see …

At the beginning of last week, one of our clients launched a fascinating exhibit. We’ve been supporting them through the opening of that exhibit and they identified some problems that they needed taken care of by this upcoming Tuesday. Even with the pressure surrounding these issues for Tuesday, our team has executed brilliantly. We brought our own goals to fruition and took care of our client’s problems, as well. We didn’t allow one to suffer for the benefit of the other, we did both.

NextShout and ComicShout were both released on-time, today. Go check them out.

Great job and many thanks to the team at Omega Vortex. You guys are all awesome.

NextShout is now available for pre-order at $15 USD. Purchase it today to get it cheaper than the release price.

Stay tuned for more release information.

A runner up that I’m going to give a nod to is Omega Vortex. Jeremy Privett knows what he’s doing when it comes to setting up a good, fluid development shop. The only reason I can’t 100% vouch for their work is that they haven’t released anything yet, and I’ve not worked with their custom shop. Good group to keep an eye on though.

Admittedly, Omega Vortex fell into the “fake” category not too many years ago before I was swept off to Colorado to go work at Completely Unique and Peak8. I filed papers on GU² Services, Inc. before it was acquired and wanted to file papers on Omega Vortex but never really got around to it until after the Peak8 era.

We do have papers, though! They’re currently in the wrong state, but Alabama’s business laws are incredibly annoying compared to Colorado’s so I may try to put off legally moving the company out of Colorado until I move to NY sometime within the next year. Unless there’s some legal reason to do otherwise which I’m not aware of. We don’t currently have any type of office space, as all of our employees work remotely, so our physical address is pretty much non-existent.

We’re working on fixing that unreleased products issue in the coming months and I’ve been working on ramping up our software division for more progress, now that we’re getting to the point where we can look at it again. Since we have some new people on our team, consulting work should no longer completely bog us down so that no work gets done in our software. We’ll have to see how it goes from here.

Quite a while ago, Omega Vortex adopted a policy that we would refrain from announcing specific release dates. We won’t even narrow it down to a month for you. There’s quite a few reasons that we do this.

We’re a startup that’s bootstrapping from consulting work. At any given time, said consulting work currently takes priority over all other things, because we have to make money in order to pay bills and keep developers paid. That’s all fine and dandy, but while we’re having to focus so much on consulting, software isn’t being written. This is eating us like the plague. We’re presently amazingly profitable, but not in the way that we want to be. No matter how good our scheduling is, it doesn’t make a difference because we’re constantly having to drop everything to invest time in a new consulting project.

On the plus side, we’re about to simultaneously release a new product that hasn’t been announced yet along with updates to two other products that you may already be familiar with. No matter how close we get to that day, we’re not going to tell you when that day will be, in advance. All of our releases are marked by quarters. Any one year is divided up into three month quarters. Q1 is January – March, Q2 is April – June, Q3 is July – September, and Q4 is October – December. That means that when we mark a release as Q3 of 2008, we could potentially release that product at any point within those three months. If we’re expecting to release in September, we’ll actually really say Q4 so that we have three extra months worth of time buffer to use in the even that something goes wrong. If we happen to meet our goal of September, we just managed to release an entire month early.

Three months of buffer is a pretty decent amount of time. Sadly, because of time constraints with our consulting work, we’re still having trouble meeting those release dates. OmegaVerge has suffered considerably because of this and it has allowed competitors to get a jump on us. (Speaking of OmegaVerge, I’d like to give a shoutout to Ben Babcock who actually managed to help me with a SimpleXML issue by letting me help him with a SimpleXML issue. We now have type-safety/inference of IP.Converge methods in OmegaVerge since we solved that issue, instead of having to pass around SimpleXMLElement objects. Thanks, Ben.)

If you’re a software development shop and, like us, you can’t dedicate 100% of your time to software development, don’t announce release dates. Even vague ones. Surprise people. People get incredibly antsy / angry when you don’t meet release dates.

Oh, and if you have a historic trend of lack of ability to execute, don’t try to say things like “this summer” or “next month” … I’m guilty of this too, but this is a practice that really needs to stop. I’ve seen so many projects say “next month” and it take so much longer than that. Two in particular have me facepalming, right now …

Not Including Basic Information

Like, for one, your name. I had a resume show up in my inbox the other day that didn’t have a name to go with it. So, I figured I could get the name out of the resume itself in order to respond. I couldn’t find the person’s name to save my life. It’s really not smart to send in a resume without basic contact details so I can get in touch with you. If you don’t include something as basic as your name, I’m going to feel dumb trying to contact you without knowing it. The likelihood of me contacting you if I feel dumb about it? Pretty low. To the tune of 0%.

Not Knowing the Basics (Or Lying)

I got a “spectacular” resume from someone who had (claimed to have) been working in this industry for 10+ years. Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from a very prestigious college and a laundry list of work experience that went on for a few pages …

First of all, I don’t need a seven page resume. That sets off some alarms in my head when I open up a huge document that’s supposed to be a resume. You’re either full of yourself or lying. I don’t need to know where you were working in 1991 if it isn’t one of your three or four most recent jobs. For this particular person, I’m inclined to say that they were lying. Against my better judgement, I decided to interview.

As part of my interview process, I like to ask some really basic questions. I do this for two reasons. One, it relieves tension. People like to get things right. As they get more things right, they become more comfortable and we can move on to more complicated concepts. For two, I know to stop the interview immediately if the person misses any of these questions … This particular person happened to miss all but two of my questions. These questions are some that my younger programming buddies who are still in High School would laugh at this person for not being able to answer. How can you have 10 years of experience and not know dead-simple concepts?

Massive Font to Extend an Otherwise Short Resume

Please, please don’t try to hide the fact that in Arial 12pt your resume is only 1 page. I just finished looking through a resume whose font was literally set to 23pt. That’s huge! And quite unnecessary. I’m not measuring to see who has the longest, but if your font is so big that I can only fit less than 1/8 of what would be the first page on my screen, I’m probably just going to delete it.

Not Knowing English

First off, don’t take this the wrong way. I’m a fan of equal opportunity, but you’ve got to meet our requirements. One of our requirements is “an excellent command of written and spoken English”. I’d just as quickly trash a resume from an white American man as I would from anyone else for not meeting that requirement.

Telling Me Too Much

Piggy backing somewhat on one of the other points, don’t tell me too much. If I’m looking for a PHP/MySQL developer, I want to know how much experience you have in those two things and maybe some other closely-related technologies. I don’t want to know or care to know about how much experience you have in Adobe Photoshop, MS Access, ILE RPG, CL400/CLLE, etc. Yes, all of those were from an actual resume. I don’t care. Don’t tell me all that crap, it’s not related to the position you’re applying for.

Lying by Omission

Or, concealing the fact that you don’t have a college degree by using phrases like “Attended X university”. Again, I don’t care, but don’t try to make me believe something by covering it up. People drop out of college all the time for various different reasons. Just couldn’t cut it? Ran out of money? Decide college wasn’t for you? That’s your business. I’m still in college. I haven’t finished my Bachelor’s, yet. I’m really not going to hold that against you. Some of the best programmers I know don’t have college degrees. Some of the worst programmers I know do. Interesting demographic. I’m more of a believer in cold, hard experience.

Telling Me Sensitive Information

If I’m not allowed to ask, I don’t want to know at least until I give you a yay or a nay. Don’t tell me your gender (if it’s obvious, I’ll figure it out), don’t tell me your sexual orientation, don’t tell me your age, etc. If you put that kind of crap on your resume, that puts employers in a bad position, because we’re not allowed to make decisions based on that information. That requires us to consciously ignore it. If it’s there, I’m not even going to bother. It’s not because you’re white, black, asian, mexican, 85, 13, gay, bi, married, divorce, have 37 kids, a woman, or a paraplegic. It’s because I don’t want to touch something that could put me in a bad position, because you gave me information that I’m not allowed to judge you on. So, I’m just not going to judge you at all and act like I never saw your resume.

Not Attaching your Resume

This is a good one. I’ve excused it a couple times and contacted people to have them send it to me, but I’m slowly starting to not give it a second thought. Make sure you’re thorough enough to remember to actually attach your resume to an e-mail when you send it off.

That’s just a few things. As I come across more, I’ll probably post a part two. You never know what people are going to do, after all …

1. Hire at least one professional

This point is crucial and will save you a lot of time and money. If you have at least one person on your in-house staff who can walk the walk and talk the talk, you’ve got someone within your organization who can look over the work that’s being done. This is very important for a number of different reasons. First, you’ve hired this guy. You know what he can do, you’ve seen his work, you’ve talked to his references. He must have done something right in order to stand out from the pile of resumes you received for the position. Make sure this person knows everything there is to know about the project that’s being worked on. He needs to be the point of contact for the consultants, because he’ll immediately be able to tell you when something isn’t right. This person’s salary will pay for itself on numerous occasions, especially if you do a lot of outsourcing.

2. Ask Questions, Get Technical

This is another place where your professional is going to help out a lot, if you don’t know enough about the technology. If the company you’re working with shows any signs that they don’t know what they’re taking about, run. Fast. If you don’t, they’ll suck you in under the premise that they know exactly what they’re doing and waste your time and money while they get little to nothing actually accomplished. Which brings me to my next point …

3. Transparency

Transparency is a huge issue. At Omega Vortex, when our clients’ don’t come with their own infrastructure, we bring them into ours so that everybody’s productivity is increased. If our clients don’t have their own concept of source control, we’ll place their code in our repository. This is complimented by our build system which will produce nightlies of the work we’ve done and post it directly to a specified location on our development server. Once the project gets farther along, we’ll enable continuous integration so that each check-in gets reflected in our development copy. This way, the client can always be sure they’re looking at the most up-to-date code.

4. Look for value

Unlike some places, we’re not interested in taking your money, doing the work, and sending you on your way. We like to form lasting relationships so that you’ll consider doing business with us again or referring people you know who need work done. A way that we add value to our services is to help them in ways that we believe they need to be helped. Bad code is bad code, there’s no two ways about that. When we can, we don’t throw away everything and start over, though. To some degree, the code works, and that’s more progress than what we would have if we just started all over. What we don’t like is when our clients get burned and come to us with code that is littered with security vulnerabilities. I mean brain-dead obvious security vulnerabilities. Like, say … Taking data directly out of $_REQUEST and feeding it directly into a SQL Query. In cases like this, we like to do a very light security audit. This isn’t anything extensive, just something we use to identify the extremely obvious stuff, and bring it to the client’s attention.

5. References – Recommendations – Required

This is a huge one. This is hard for me to say, because we were new once too (we still kinda are), but taking a chance on a company with no references or recommendations from other people is dangerous. For Omega Vortex, I can provide you with professional references of people I’ve worked with in the past and know me and how I do things. We also have a few clients that have spoken highly of us. Just make sure you get references and recommendations from real people. Testimonials on websites can be faked. While they’re a decent way to tell what a company’s done at a glance, when you can you should talk to people who have worked with the company in the past. Ask the company to provide formal references. Remember, you’re about to spend what could be a good chunk of time and money with this company. Would you hire a random person for your company without references?

Hopefully, this list will help you make a more informed decision about the next company you decide to do a project with. Even if we’re not right for you, we certainly don’t want you picking someone else who’s even more wrong for you. While this is obviously tailored toward programming, I’m sure you could adapt this list some for other industries, too.

I’m certainly a coder at heart … Omega Vortex just launched its Games Division, so be on the lookout for (what I think will be) some pretty cool stuff from us there.