Companies doing the right thing
As I read through my mass of email from this morning, I happened upon one of my daily news bites that had the title “Office Depot gives away copies”. Being the deal hunter that I am, I figured I would check this out and see what the fuss was all about, and why this made headlines. I was taken back by the news that Office Depot is actually giving away resume copies (up to 25 copies) until the end of May. This was incredible to me. Just another amazing step taken by companies to actually make a difference in the rough times we are having.
Most of us have seen the new car commercials that promise “lose your job, we’ll make your payments”. Saturn, Chrysler and a few others have made these claims to keep making payments for a few months. Another step forward in the right direction. Now, I honestly haven’t read the fine print, and I would say that if you are in for losing your job, buying a new car might not be the best investment unless you have no other choice.
The point here is not if these companies are doing this for the right reasons or not, the marketing tactic is genius, and fixates on helping people which is what we need today. I am hoping that companies follow this example and we see more of this activity in the near future.
In: Rambling · Tagged with: sustainability jobs
Resume Clarity, Interview Techniques and Dogs
So this week I have been working with my team to do some interviews with contractors. It hasn’t been all that fun and this is because like wild dogs, the market is bad so they all come running when there is food to offer. We have actually had some great filtering by our HR department, but reading resumes and interviews has made me want to post this as a way to remind people some basic information when giving out your resume and interviewing.
This could also be some good information for those who do interviews as I am also relying on them to help with guiding the candidates.
Clear and Concise
Resume: A resume is a representation of yourself in short form. It is there to capture the reader in a short amount of time and easily achieve your message without a lot of time and decoding of the message within. I rifled through a half dozen resumes that were novels. Some of those folks made the cut, but trying to then do the interview with 10 pages to flip through can be quite cumbersome.
Interview: When you are asked a question in an interview, do your best to stay on topic. Too often I hear people try to over explain a simple question and that begins to trail off into the distance. This muddies the water on what you understand and what you are trying to fluff.
Be Honest
Resume: Seriously… do you know every single language that is out there? If you put it down on your resume, expect that you will be quizzed on it. If you are the interviewer, you had better be sure your candidate didn’t just read a book or hear about the technology in passing. Have questions and dig into detail.
Interview: It is OK to say “I don’t know” in an interview. Not all interview questions are must have questions. If you try and be the all knowing interview candidate, you will sound fake and will most likely miss out on the opportunity. It doesn’t benefit you or the company you are interviewing for to lie and force an awkward termination soon thereafter.
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The short of this all is don’t be a dog coming too hungry. Pick and choose your battles in your resume and your interview. I will agree that you are trying to sell yourself in a resume, just don’t be the greasy car sales person.
‘AJAXControlToolkit’ is undefined – iislog sc-win32-status = 64 and sc-status = 200
So I deployed a killer internal application today that well over 400 employees will be using on a daily basis. I decided to use the AJAX control toolkit to give the application better error checking and more of a windows application feel without having to deal with the deployment and maintenance of a windows app. We all know how fun that can be in an enterprise!! Needless to say, the application passed through QA with flying colors and moved on to production. That is where we ran into some problems. It was random, and it was very difficult to trace, not to mention we didn’t have technical people doing the troubleshooting at the client level. As we started to parse the IIS logs, we found that we were getting a IIS Status 64 which is a network type error from IIS. It was always preceeded with a success (200) status. Our server engineering department went the route of verifying we were all good on the network side while I kept trying to get on an effected machine.
After finally getting on the phone with someone who was experiencing the issue, I was able to determine the issue was related to a JS error. ‘AJAXControlToolkit’ is undefined. GREAT, but WHY???
SIDE NOTE: We were very early adopters of the toolkit during its beta stages. MS was great with helping to resolve issues as well as incorporate our feedback in future releases. One of those items was the script combiner in the library. The toolkit is VERY heavy when it is not compressed (~500k) based on what controls you are using. This amounts to 14 different scripts being pulled down on our servers which is one for every control type and a few for the framework itself. As you can guess, this is pretty taxing on the client vs. just getting one file. We manually implemented the script combining on our customer site which took 3 seconds off the average download time due to less items having to be called from the server. Not to mention compression that took the ~500k script to ~90k. With the following in the latest release you can do this without having a manual work around.
The problem
Bad <ajaxtoolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="_ScriptManager" runat="server" combinescripts="true" />
Great right? Wrong… this is what was causing the issue!!! The script combiner for some reason doesn’t always generate the script for the client. It is pretty buggy actually. We were finding that clearing the users cache would only work until the next build would come out. After that, we would have to clear the cache again for all 400 clients. Because of this we were ready to scrap the controls (which MADE the application) for standard ASP.NET controls.
So, the workaround… go back to our standard hack that combined the files… and for those that don’t want to do the hack? Switch the combinescripts tag to true and your problem will go away!
The fix:
Good <ajaxtoolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="_ScriptManager" runat="server" combinescripts="false" />
Needless to say, this was a big “phew” from us. We believe the framework has a lot of great potential for internal apps by allowing us to have a windows like feel without the deployment nightmare. The application has already proved to have a huge payoff with this fix alone. We were able to deploy enterprise wide in less than 10 seconds with an automated build.
In: Programming, Troubleshooting