On 09 Apr 2011, at 09:34, laurent laffont wrote:

Hi,

I discovered Smalltalk and Pharo almost three years ago and just after read Chad Fowler book "Passionate Programmer" (1st edition title was "My job went to India"). These have changed my developer life, how I perceive software and that great technology is fun, people doing it more. You're a cool community and I'm proud to be there.

Now I've started an aside (paid :) independent developer activity thanks to a cool guy. That would not be possible without all the stuff I learn every day from the community and the urge to continue you give me.

Great for you Laurent, you absolutely deserve, I wish you success.

Each time I've made a step forward (open a blog, write ProfStef, fix bugs, create PharoCasts) I've been amazed that the generated effects were those described in Passionate Programmer (go read it !) The last chapter is "Go independent" so now I need the sequel ;)

Special big thank you to Stéphane Ducasse - you're crazy :) Long live Pharo !

PS: nice piece of Passionate Programmer:

When I was in India weeding through hundreds of candidates for only tens of jobs, the interview team was exhausting itself and running out of time because of a poor interview-to-hire hit rate. Heads hurting and eyes red, we held a late-night meeting to discuss a strategic change in the way we would go through the candidates. We had to either optimize the process so we could interview more people or somehow interview better people (or both). With what little was left of my voice after twelve straight hours of trying to drag answers out of dumbstruck programmers, I argued for adding Smalltalk to the list of keywords our headhunters were using to search their résumé database. But, nobody knows Smalltalk in India, cried the human resources director. That was my point. Nobody knew it, and programming in Smalltalk was a fundamentally different experience than programming in Java. The varying experience would give candidates a different level of expectations, and the dynamic nature of the Smalltalk environment would reshape the way a Java programmer would approach a problem. My hope was that these factors would encourage a level of technical maturity that I hadn’t been seeing from the candidates I’d met so far. The addition of Smalltalk to the requirements list yielded a candidate pool that was tiny in contrast to our previous list. These people were diamonds in the rough. They really understood object-oriented programming. They were aware that Java isn’t the idealistic panacea it’s sometimes made out to be. Many of them loved to program! Where have you been for the past two weeks? we thought. Unfortunately, our ability to attract these developers for the salaries we were able to pay was limited. They were calling the shots, and most of them chose to stay where they were or to keep looking for a new job. Though we failed to recruit many of them, we learned a valuable recruit- ing lesson: we were more likely to extend offers to candidates with diverse (and even unorthodox) experience than to those whose experiences were homogenous. My explanation is that either the good people seek out diversity, because they love to learn new things, or being forced into alien experiences and environments created more mature, well-rounded soft- ware developers. I suspect it’s a little of both, but regardless of why it works, we learned that it works. I still use this technique when looking for developers.

Nice story, very true here as well, developers with broad interests are better, but there are not many of them.

Laurent Laffont - @lolgzs

Pharo Smalltalk Screencasts: http://www.pharocasts.com/ Blog: http://magaloma.blogspot.com/ Developer group: http://cara74.seasidehosting.st

This equally applies to research, thanks to all of you. Alexandre On 9 Apr 2011, at 03:34, laurent laffont wrote:

Hi,

I discovered Smalltalk and Pharo almost three years ago and just after read Chad Fowler book "Passionate Programmer" (1st edition title was "My job went to India"). These have changed my developer life, how I perceive software and that great technology is fun, people doing it more. You're a cool community and I'm proud to be there.

Now I've started an aside (paid :) independent developer activity thanks to a cool guy. That would not be possible without all the stuff I learn every day from the community and the urge to continue you give me.

Each time I've made a step forward (open a blog, write ProfStef, fix bugs, create PharoCasts) I've been amazed that the generated effects were those described in Passionate Programmer (go read it !) The last chapter is "Go independent" so now I need the sequel ;)

Special big thank you to Stéphane Ducasse - you're crazy :) Long live Pharo !

PS: nice piece of Passionate Programmer:

When I was in India weeding through hundreds of candidates for only tens of jobs, the interview team was exhausting itself and running out of time because of a poor interview-to-hire hit rate. Heads hurting and eyes red, we held a late-night meeting to discuss a strategic change in the way we would go through the candidates. We had to either optimize the process so we could interview more people or somehow interview better people (or both). With what little was left of my voice after twelve straight hours of trying to drag answers out of dumbstruck programmers, I argued for adding Smalltalk to the list of keywords our headhunters were using to search their résumé database. But, nobody knows Smalltalk in India, cried the human resources director. That was my point. Nobody knew it, and programming in Smalltalk was a fundamentally different experience than programming in Java. The varying experience would give candidates a different level of expectations, and the dynamic nature of the Smalltalk environment would reshape the way a Java programmer would approach a problem. My hope was that these factors would encourage a level of technical maturity that I hadn’t been seeing from the candidates I’d met so far. The addition of Smalltalk to the requirements list yielded a candidate pool that was tiny in contrast to our previous list. These people were diamonds in the rough. They really understood object-oriented programming. They were aware that Java isn’t the idealistic panacea it’s sometimes made out to be. Many of them loved to program! Where have you been for the past two weeks? we thought. Unfortunately, our ability to attract these developers for the salaries we were able to pay was limited. They were calling the shots, and most of them chose to stay where they were or to keep looking for a new job. Though we failed to recruit many of them, we learned a valuable recruit- ing lesson: we were more likely to extend offers to candidates with diverse (and even unorthodox) experience than to those whose experiences were homogenous. My explanation is that either the good people seek out diversity, because they love to learn new things, or being forced into alien experiences and environments created more mature, well-rounded soft- ware developers. I suspect it’s a little of both, but regardless of why it works, we learned that it works. I still use this technique when looking for developers.

Laurent Laffont - @lolgzs

Pharo Smalltalk Screencasts: http://www.pharocasts.com/ Blog: http://magaloma.blogspot.com/ Developer group: http://cara74.seasidehosting.st

-- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.

Congratulations and best luck! Thank you so much for sharing :) Cheers, Vanessa. On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 4:34 AM, laurent laffont <laurent.laffont@gmail.com>wrote:

Hi,

I discovered Smalltalk and Pharo almost three years ago and just after read Chad Fowler book "Passionate Programmer" (1st edition title was "My job went to India"). These have changed my developer life, how I perceive software and that great technology is fun, people doing it more. You're a cool community and I'm proud to be there.

Now I've started an aside (paid :) independent developer activity thanks to a cool guy. That would not be possible without all the stuff I learn every day from the community and the urge to continue you give me.

Each time I've made a step forward (open a blog, write ProfStef, fix bugs, create PharoCasts) I've been amazed that the generated effects were those described in Passionate Programmer (go read it !) The last chapter is "Go independent" so now I need the sequel ;)

Special big thank you to Stéphane Ducasse - you're crazy :) Long live Pharo !

PS: nice piece of Passionate Programmer:

When I was in India weeding through hundreds of candidates for only tens of jobs, the interview team was exhausting itself and running out of time because of a poor interview-to-hire hit rate. Heads hurting and eyes red, we held a late-night meeting to discuss a strategic change in the way we would go through the candidates. We had to either optimize the process so we could interview more people or somehow interview better people (or both). With what little was left of my voice after twelve straight hours of trying to drag answers out of dumbstruck programmers, I argued for adding Smalltalk to the list of keywords our headhunters were using to search their résumé database. But, nobody knows Smalltalk in India, cried the human resources director. That was my point. Nobody knew it, and programming in Smalltalk was a fundamentally different experience than programming in Java. The varying experience would give candidates a different level of expectations, and the dynamic nature of the Smalltalk environment would reshape the way a Java programmer would approach a problem. My hope was that these factors would encourage a level of technical maturity that I hadn’t been seeing from the candidates I’d met so far. The addition of Smalltalk to the requirements list yielded a candidate pool that was tiny in contrast to our previous list. These people were diamonds in the rough. They really understood object-oriented programming. They were aware that Java isn’t the idealistic panacea it’s sometimes made out to be. Many of them loved to program! Where have you been for the past two weeks? we thought. Unfortunately, our ability to attract these developers for the salaries we were able to pay was limited. They were calling the shots, and most of them chose to stay where they were or to keep looking for a new job. Though we failed to recruit many of them, we learned a valuable recruit- ing lesson: we were more likely to extend offers to candidates with diverse (and even unorthodox) experience than to those whose experiences were homogenous. My explanation is that either the good people seek out diversity, because they love to learn new things, or being forced into alien experiences and environments created more mature, well-rounded soft- ware developers. I suspect it’s a little of both, but regardless of why it works, we learned that it works. I still use this technique when looking for developers.

Laurent Laffont - @lolgzs <http://twitter.com/#%21/lolgzs>

Pharo Smalltalk Screencasts: http://www.pharocasts.com/ Blog: http://magaloma.blogspot.com/ Developer group: http://cara74.seasidehosting.st