[SWLUG] Improvements

[Gareth James Powell]

Hi again,

rhys_sage at yahoo.com wrote:
> 
> Thanks to everybody that had a look at my CV. I can see why the "used to"
> might be ambiguous. I've added ISO 9000 on the basis that anything written

 Sorry I did not get around to look at your site last night (I will
try again!) as I was putting together a PC from spare bits so that the
little one could MSN without me being shunted off the main box, which
is the rule in this house :( 

 Teenager rule #5: The fastest, newest, coolest <XYZ> is _mine_, even
if the oldies claim that they own it and want to use it for serious
work, which is so lame*.

*Its not the current term used, I did not post the real one as it
might cause offence.

> as documentation is a step towards ISO 9000. I'll have to try to get hold of
> a copy of the ISO 9000 document from somewhere. I just hope it's a pamphlet
> and not a whopping great big tome. Generally, my philosophy is minimalism -
> why beat around the bush with documentation when it can be made very clear
> in just a few words.

 ISO9000 has matured and expanded from the original (1987) with the
latest two being 1994 and 2000:

 1987 - First release of ISO 9000 family.
 1994 - New revision: ISO 9000-1, 9001, 9002, 9003, 9004-1 & 8402.
 2000 - Major revision, now 3 standards: 9000, 9001, 9004.

 You can gain an understanding of ISO9K but it is quite a beast and a
lot of small companies *groan* at the work involved to implement it.
Some do it only because a customer requires it of their suppliers. At
the full-on corporate level implementation you will need to strap on
an extra brain to hold all the information in. The Capability Maturity
Model (CMM) is orthagonal with ISO9K and is also good to know about. 
 Implementing ISO9K or CMM at a personal level would be a crazy thing
to do but you can glean things from them, influence the way you go
about your business, help you analyse what you do and why so that you
can improve it. Try
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/93.reports/93.tr.024.html
for an overview on CMM.

  If you want to try a very lightweight development process (i.e.
little documentation) Google for Extreme Programming (XP) and 'agile
methodologies'. These methodologies tend to regard the developer as a
disciplined professional rather than a labour unit and are more
demanding of you as a person as a consequence e.g. not falling back
into code n' fix when the pressure is on.

> 
[snip]
> 
> As far as selling myself goes, I'm absolutely useless at doing that. I can
> stand on a street corner and yell "I'm great" but I'm most definitely not a

 It will come in time. Practice interviews, feedback and looking at
how other people do their CVs, or not as the case may be, can help. If
you know your stuff and can explain it to other people in a confident
tone then that is half the battle in 'selling' yourself as you know.
Confidence is the key, it is what other people pick up on, but of
course some do go a bit far and appear arrogant while not meaning to!

> salesman. In fact, a lot of my "jobsearch" involves using Spam-Master (the
> mass emailing program I wrote), combined with Harvester (my email address
> harvesting program) and running them in conjunction with the Jobserve
> directory of employers and agencies.
> 

 Maybe if your are flooding everybody with CVs then they are ending up
in /dev/null and your email address in a killfile due to anti-spam
software? </IRONY> In any case you might get a bad reputation for not
being serious and targeting your CV - "Oh! its _that_ guy applying for
*everything* Delphi-ish again, bin it."

[snip]
> 
> Rhys
> 

Regards,
Gareth.