Opinion

Being taxed for other people’s music habit

Colin Angus Mackay — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:57:07 GMT

In a blog post by Lily Allan, she quotes a message she got from Matt Bellamy from MUSE who said “Someone who just checks email uses minimal bandwidth, but someone who downloads 1 gig per day uses way more, but at the moment they pay the same. It is clear which user is hitting the creative industries and it is clear which user is not, so for this reason, usage should also be priced accordingly.”

He is basically suggesting that people pay a download tax to pay for the “creative industries” that are being hit by piracy.

In short, he wants me to pay for other people’s indiscretion in obtaining music, TV and movies via a mechanism that doesn’t compensate the artist that created these.

I am totally against this because I do not partake in such activity. My daily downloads do actually average about a gigabyte per day, but this is made up of things like using the BBC iPlayer, Spotify, downloads via my MSDN Subscription and so on. All of these result in large downloads. All of these provide me with legal content.

On top of that I buy many DVDs, CDs and buy a fair amount of music via the iTunes app on my iPhone. In fact, I often end up with a number of copies of the same thing, paying multiple times effectively, so I can have the music in a format that I want.

Am I hitting the creative industries? Good grief no! If anything they should be compensating me for having paid for their works multiple times over.

But, Matt Bellamy may be suggesting a get out clause so I don’t have to pay, yet again, for legal content: “ISPs should have to pay in the same way with a collection agency like PRS doing the monitoring and calculations based on encoded (but freely downloaded) data.”

If he is suggesting what I think he’s suggesting I really don’t think he’s thought it through all that well.

First there is the civil liberty issue of having the ISP monitor your communications. Sure, it would be relatively easy for them to examine the data that’s being passed through. In fact, to some extent they have to do that anyway because they have to examine the TCP/IP headers in order to route traffic. However, music and movie downloads are significantly larger. Roughly 7 to 9 orders of magnitude bigger.

Also, while a TCP/IP header is very well defined, digitally encoded creative works can be encoded in many different ways. MP3, MPEG, WMA, WMV, etc. How do you tell what it is you have? How would you create a system that would work out that a particular MP3 is a Lily Allen track? If you had the CD you could rip it in many different ways resulting in many different representations, some smaller lower quality, some larger higher quality. How do you correctly identify all that?

Personally, that idea it is a non-starter at current technological levels. Secondly, we’re heading towards a general election soon and most political parties that are vying for power at the moment are campaigning on a stance of improving civil liberties and reducing surveillance on the populace – They are unlikely to be legislating to allow ISPs to spy on network traffic like this for what is essentially a civil matter.

Technorati Tags: lily allan,tax,file sharing

[Normal service will be resumed in the next post]

How I’m reducing my debt

Colin Angus Mackay — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:06:19 GMT

I recently came across some notes I’d made some years ago about how I planned to reduce my debt and increase my savings. It is something that has worked (and is working) for me and it might be useful to others so I thought I’d share it. This comes with the caveat that you need to look at your own personal situation and apply this only if you are comfortable with it.

Reducing Credit Card debts

If you do not have the option of replacing high interest credit cards with a lower interest loan there are some things you can do with your existing cards.

If you have multiple cards, pay off the card with the highest interest payments first.

Say you have three cards each wanting a minimum payment of £50 each. The interest rate on each card is different and you have a budget of £200 for repaying credit cards. The card with the highest interest rate is costing you more than the others. Pay £100 per month to that and leave the others paying the minimum.

Assuming you are not still spending on the cards the two cards you have left on minimum payments only will also start to slowly reduce meaning their minimum payments also go down. This means more money for paying off the expensive card so its debt reduces more quickly thus getting rid of the expensive debt. Once that card is paid off choose the next most expensive card and repeat the process.

I once worked out that if I just left all my cards on the minimum payment only it would take 27 years to pay off the debt I had and cost three times the the original debt.

Increasing Savings

Extended warrantees and consumer insurance

Some time ago it occurred to me that I’ve rarely needed to use extended warrantees that shops offer on consumer goods. The same goes with mobile phone and laptop insurance. In fact in the last decade I’ve had one mobile stolen and one microwave break in what would have been the extended period. The total cost of that was £250. However, compare that to the cost of the insurances and extended warrantees that I was offered for the same period.

What I did instead was set up a savings account that I’d put money into every time I was offered an extended warrantee or a (in my opinion) pointless insurance policy. The last time I was offered mobile phone insurance they wanted £5 per month. So £5 per month goes into that account. PC world wanted £15 per month for insuring my laptop with some “support” services I didn’t need*, so that goes in too.

Incidentally, I have my laptop (among other specified items) covered on my home contents insurance and it costs me an extra £50 per year, so that (£4 per month) gets deducted from the money PC world wanted. So I now have £16 per month going into a savings account just from those two things. If either my laptop or mobile needs to be unexpectedly replaced I have some funds to draw on. In the case of the laptop I’d be able to put the funds back when my home contents policy paid out too.

Be careful what you consider to be a pointless insurance policy. I would never class home contents or buildings insurance as pointless even although I’ve paid thousands of pounds over the years into such things and only received back about £200 so far. The simple reason is that I don’t have nearly £200K to replace my home, nor do I have the resources to suddenly replace large quantities of my belongings either if the need arises.

Also, some people I’ve spoken to do seem to regularly have accidents with their laptops or mobiles so the dedicated insurance policy may be good for them.

Over the years I’ve built up a savings account with about £3000 in it.

* I almost walked out the shop, I tried to explain I was a software developer and all the issues he was telling me the support would cover me for I could deal with perfectly capably on my own.

Paying things monthly

Some things like insurance policies can be paid monthly instead of annually. At first this may seem an excellent way of spreading the cost, but beware that the insurance company will often charge quite a hefty interest rate for that. If you can pay up front you can save quite a bit of money.

When I first started doing this I couldn’t afford to pay all the things I wanted upfront, so I had to take the hit of the interest payments the first few years. What I did instead was set up another savings account to save up for each item so that when the renewal date came around I had enough money to pay it up front the next year.

As I couldn’t afford to start doing this for everything I chose one thing that I could afford to pay twice over (once to the insurance company AND the same amount into the savings account). At the start of the next year I could afford to pay that insurance policy up front, for much less than it had cost the previous year, so I had money left over in the savings account too. I then moved on to starting to pay the second policy twice over (once to the insurance company and once into my savings account).

Over time, I also added car tax (an annual payment if you want it cheap), an estimate of the servicing charges for my car (MOT, servicing costs, tyre replacement costs*, etc) and so on. I worked out what those costs are on a monthly basis and add it to the savings account. When my car tax is due the money is already there.

Other things which I buy on a longer cycle (a new PC, a new car**, etc.) I do the same thing with. It all starts to add up, and I much prefer having the money in my account than in someone else’s account.

* If you are curious, I actually calculated that based on my driving style I need to replace a tyre on average once every 6500 miles. Knowing that and my average annual mileage I can annualise the cost.

** Although with the amount going in to my savings account for a new car, I’ll be two or three cars down the line before I can walk into the showroom with all the money up front.

Offset Mortgages

In my opinion these are one of the best inventions in the mortgage market. There were a lot of really duff ideas in that area over the last few years like endowment mortgages and sub-prime mortgages, but offset mortgages are one of the ideas that really works well, I think.

How they work is that they money in your savings account offsets the capital that is to be repaid on your mortgage. What that means is that, say you have a £100K mortgage and £10K in your savings account you pay interest on only £90K of the mortgage. Since mortgage interest is typically* higher than a savings rate you might be offered on a savings account the saving in interest on the mortgage is better than the interest you would have received on the savings account. Added to that is the bonus that since you are not receiving any interest payments on the savings the tax is zero, so it works out even better.

Depending on the mortgage lender there are a variety of ways to calculate how the offset works. My particular lender gives me three options and I can change those whenever I want.

1. Offsetting reduces the interest payments you pay each month. The term of the mortgage remains the same as the capital is being repaid at the same rate, however the monthly mortgage payments are reduced.

2. Offsetting increases the capital repayments each month. Instead of reducing the monthly bill, it stays the same as if there was no offsetting, the savings you would have made are used to pay off some more of the capital. Your capital reduces faster which means each month you are paying off more capital than you would have been otherwise. The term of your mortgage reduces as the capital is paid off more quickly.

3. A hybrid of the above two options. Essentially option 2 is in effect until the interest rate changes. The mortgage is then recalculated to maintain the original end date, the overall monthly bill will reduce at this point if you had something to offset.

When I did my calculations I estimated that over the course of my mortgage I’d be £15K better off than a regular tracker mortgage + a high interest savings account.

* Although I have seen a number of savings accounts these days with interest rates at 4% above the Bank of England base rate, so it may be that right now one of those savings accounts may be the better option.

Other things

Other things I did to cut my debt and increase my savings were mostly to do with cutting out the subscriptions to things I didn’t need, or reduce my outgoings in other ways.

For example, I worked out that I was only really watching Sky for one show. It was much cheaper just to buy the DVDs. So that’s what I did. And I can watch my favourite TV show any time I like now.

I was buying a weekly rail pass, so I changed to a monthly pass. And if I planned my holidays far enough in advance I could match them up with the renewal date of the pass, or go back to weekly passes briefly, so that I wasn’t wasting additional money.

Also, I didn’t need to go and buy a sandwich at lunch time. I could just bring a packed lunch. Although I have to admit that didn’t last long as I’m not a morning person and making my lunch the evening before just meant it wasn’t very nice when I came to actually eating it.

Shop around for deals. If you have gas and electricity there are often deals where you get money off if you go with the same supplier.

Do you desperately need that new TV or will the old bulky CRT behemoth you have still do? Seriously! My parents have a really nice HD TV and quite frankly I can’t see the difference unless I’m really close up staring directly into the pixels.

Finally

I’d like to say that these are things that have worked for me.I present them as mere options. Whether they will work for you depend on your circumstances. I’m not a debt councillor nor do I want to be. You take this advice at your own risk.

Follow up on what not to develop

Colin Angus Mackay — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:31:35 GMT

Back in May I wrote about a substandard website I attempted to use in an article entitled “What not to Develop”. I also sent the hotel an email at the same time telling them of the failing of their website, however, I never got a response.

When the post went live initially, I got asked on twitter to name and shame the company in question. I suppose publically decrying a company has the effect that if people start doing that then companies will be pressurised in to providing a better service or product. These days I do not to put in a blog post the name of the company in question until I’ve given them a chance to respond to any email I might have sent. I sent the email on 16 May 2009 at 17:21 (BST), I think that’s quite enough time for a response.

I’ve decided to publish some more details so that people can at least learn from the mistake and not repeat them elsewhere. Essentially, this is an extract of the email (slightly reformatted to fit this blog)

Hello,

I tried to book on your website last night and it didn't work - it advertised a rate to me then refused to book it. I then tried to use your Contact Us page to send you a message and that also broke and said "The web site you are accessing has experienced an unexpected error. Please contact the website administrator. "

I don't know who the web site administrator is, but I can guess it is someone employed by TIG Global given this news story: http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4036652.search. Personally, if that is the quality they are delivering I wouldn't use them again as they are not very good and are at best turning away potential customers and at worst exposing you to needless risk.

In order to [help you to] track down the errors I've gone back and replicated the initial problem annotating the pages as I go. You will find a number of graphics files attached.

In [the above image] I show the initial details of my availability search. Check in Friday 31st July, check out Sunday 2nd Aug. 1 adult, 0 children.

In [the above image] I show the next page. This was a pop-up, so opened a new window. The details at the top are correct and match what I'd previously entered. The description of the "Weekend Advanced Purchase" sounds perfect "Valid Friday-Sunday throughout 2009". I see that it is £150 for the "Total price of the stay". I press the book button.

In [the above image] I show the next page. This was another pop-up, so opened a second window. I now have 3 windows open just for your hotel. (Is this really necessary?). I spot that the number of nights has increased to 3, so I go to change it back to two. I then get an unhelpfully terse error message that says "Minimum stay: 3" [See the next image]

At this point I'm some what irritated by the experience so go hunting for your contact us page. I see that it is a form only without an email address. I fill in the form and when I'm ready I press the "Submit" button. At this point I get an error page back that includes the message "The following information is meant for the website developer for debugging purposes." You might want to tell those developers that this information is also useful for attackers and they shouldn't be displaying it to the public. If the developers were any good what they would have done is get the website to log the information internally and display a general message to the user. If they wanted to tie up a user's experiences with what is in the log then they might also include a randomly generated (say a GUID - globally unique identifier) identifier that is put in the log and displayed so a user can refer to when explaining what problems they were having at the time.

The error message that should have never been displayed is [as follows].

The details in the error page also contain my original complaint. I think I now understand where the American formatting of culture specific information (e.g. dates) is coming from.The company that produced your website was American and in their arrogance just assumed everyone else was just as comfortable using MONTH/DAY/year. I suspect that same arrogance was also responsible for the other failings I've pointed out here.

Regards,

Colin.

So, there you are. The hotel is the Southwark Rose Hotel, and their website was produced by TIG Global. (I’ve recently noticed it actually says that at the bottom of the web pages and I need not have searched for relevant press releases!). Incidentally, you can click on any of the graphics to be taken to my Flickr account to see the full sized version.

What were they thinking?

Colin Angus Mackay — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:57:30 GMT

I just spotted the following advert on StackOverflow:

I have to say that I really don't know what they were thinking when they thought up that advert. I especially wouldn’t know how to interpret this advert if I was a developer working at VSoft Technologies (the company that make FinalBuilder) and I’d just been described as a “chimp”!

It is also generally disparaging towards the people that are actually employed to write build scripts. I’ve had to write build scripts and while it isn’t exactly at the most glamorous end of software development it isn’t necessarily something you could hand over to a random person to do which is surely the implication if you believe that a trained chimp could do it.

If VSoft are hiring people that are at the level of trained chimps then I really don’t want to go anywhere near their products. I have enough trouble dealing with flaky software without adding more uncertainty to the mix.

Obviously the advert was meant to be amusing and funny. The only people I would expect to be genuinely amused by it are dimwits who are dismissive towards those that actually get stuff done by making flippant comments that trivialise the hard work needed to make the software that drives much of the devices used in the modern world.

Rant of the Day: Marketers bending the facts

Colin Angus Mackay — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:29:07 GMT

I’ve just read a press release by Telerik claiming that their tools are the “preferred” choice among asp.netPRO readers. The rest of the blurb is about winning awards. True, they won awards. But it is the claim that “Telerik products are their [asp.netPRO readers] preferred choice when it comes to web development” that irritates me.

In fact, it all comes down to the word “preferred”, because when you see the actual awards you’ll see that Telerik didn’t actually come first (a prerequisite to being “preferred” I’d have thought) in many of those awards. And going by the way one of my colleagues rants about his use of Telerik products and the performance issues incurred in a previous job, I have to wonder about some things.

Marketing people will milk any public compliment for everything they can, and that is fine. But I don’t like it when they push the bounds.

So, lets look at the evidence. Here are the results of the asp.netPRO 2009 Readers’ Choice Awards.

Incidentally, none of the categories are called “Best…” anything that I could see. That is more spinning of the facts in my book.

Charting and Graphics Tool: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is Developer Express XtraCharts Suite. Telerik were a runner up.
Component Set: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is Developer Express DXexperience ASP.NET. Telerik were a runner up.
Content Management System: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Web Content Management. Telerik were an honourable mention.
Grid: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is Developer Express ASPxGridView. Telerik were a runner up.
Navigation Control: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is Developer Express ASPxNavBar. Telerik were runner up.
Online Editor: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is Developer Express ASPxHTML Editor. Telerik were runner up.
Printing/Reporting tool: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is Developer Express XtraReports Suite. Telerik were runner up.
Scheduling/Calendar Tool: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is Developer Express ASPxScheduler. Telerik were runner up.
Testing/QA Tool: Finally, Telerik are a winner! But what is this “Powered by ArtOfTest” all about? Call me cynical, but it seems it wasn’t all Telerik’s own work.
Training: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is ASPSmith.com’s ASP.NET Training. Telerik were once again a runner up.
Utility: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is Developer Express ASPxSpellChecker. Telerik were a runner up.
Silverlight: Winner (and therefore the actual “preferred” choice) is Developer Express AgDataGrid Suite. Telerik were runner up.

So, to summarise. Yes, Telerik did very well, but they were the “preferred” choice in just one category by my reckoning.

What not to develop

Colin Angus Mackay — Sat, 16 May 2009 14:20:57 GMT

I was recently looking to book a hotel in Southwark in London. I thought I’d found the perfect hotel, it was inexpensive (by London standards) and close to where I would be visiting. They also had availability on an offer for £75 per night, so long as you checked in and out on specific days, which I happened to be doing. It looked perfect.

But then things started to go wrong.

I selected the rate from the availability page and clicked the “Book” button. The next page popped up (it opened a new window) and the details were pre-populated. However, it had changed the number of nights from 2 to 3. I didn’t want 3 nights, so I changed it back to 2 and I got a rather terse message saying “Minimum Stay: 3”. I’m happy to accept that style of message from a compiler, but not from a public facing website.

I went back and repeated the process wondering if I’d somehow clicked on the wrong rate. I double checked everything this time. Date is correct (but in an American format on a .co.uk website), number of people (1), number of nights (2), number of rooms (1), the room description explicitly gives the rules for the stay conditions for the rate. I meet all the conditions that are presented to me. I press “Book” again…

And it has pre-populated everything again and added an extra night on. I don’t want an extra night! Why even present me with a rate that I can’t have because it doesn't meet my needs.

By this point I’m more than a wee bit frustrated. So I take off to the website’s contact us page. Instead of providing an email address there is a form to fill in. So, I write a description of the issues I was seeing on their site at which point the site fails again. It failed spectacularly badly. If it had taken me to an error page I would have just shrugged my shoulders and gone off elsewhere. But no, it decided to throw up its internals at me. It vomited details of the SQL Statement that failed, stack traces and so on.

It even had the audacity to tell me that “The following information is meant for the website developer for debugging purposes.” It might have well have said “The following information is meant for an attacker so they can destroy our server.”

So, back to my title, what not to develop. There were many failings on this website that I could see. The user experience was poor to start with and it then descended in to abject failure when it vomited its guts up at me.

1. Don’t use pop-up windows; browsers may block them; they cause confusion for some users. Absolutely do not have a pop-up out of a pop-up; it clutters my screen with needless windows.

2. Don’t have a disconnect between the display locale on the site and the TLD. If you have a geographic TLD then display information in a way that consistent with the culture of that location. e.g. Do not display dates in Month/Day/Year format when you are serving pages on a .co.uk domain. If you have customers from overseas and want to localise content for them then offer that ability, but default to your own locale if you don’t know their preference. Some websites try to be clever and will detect based on the IP of the user but even this isn’t 100% accurate. I’m located in Glasgow, but if you use a IP geo location service it shows me in Greater Manchester.

3. If a user has told you their needs do not present rates that do not meet those needs. If you do want to show near alternatives then make it clear that the details entered do not match the rate displayed, but some minor changes will get the user the rate. Put this information at the bottom or in a different colour. Anything that makes it easily distinguishable.

4. Don’t allow a business rule to mismatch the user friendly description. Make sure that the description of the rate actually matches the business rules that will be used to enforce the rate. If you have a rate that is described to the user as from X to Y don’t have the underlying business rules enforce a stay from X to Z. That will just irritate people.

5. Don’t give users terse error messages; it is unpleasant and unfriendly. If a user has made a mistake then gently point it out.

6. Don’t just send data to the database without validating it first. If a user has typed something that is too long for the column in the database for which it is destined then the software controlling the website should never have attempted to send it to the database in the first place.

7. Don’t display information that could be useful to an attacker. Don’t display stack traces, SQL Statements, system generated error messages, code snippets, etc.

Technorati Tags: fail,website,software development,sql,debug,attack,stack trace,business rules

It's that time of year again

Colin Angus Mackay — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 04:33:51 GMT

It seems to be that time of year when lots of students are on forums trying to persuade people to do their homework for them. Since I've found difficulty in finding good quality software developers in the past there is no way I'm going to contribute to producing any more debased lazy Muppets claiming to be programmers. The rules of the forums I frequent most often are very simple, and I'd imagine that most forums will have the same set of rules. Basically the person requesting help has to show what they've done already then they can expect to get advice on how to fix the problem. If the question comes in and it is just a set of questions with a plea that their homework assignment is due the next day then they are likely to feel the wrath of several professional software developers that have most likely had to clean up the excrement left by previous generations of these inattentive indolent laggards.

I would like to make it perfectly clear for any student that is genuinely struggling with an assignment that forums are an excellent place to seek help. However, you must show that you've made an attempt yourself, that you've attempted to research the topic and that you are genuinely seeking help and not just a free ride. If you are willing to work through the problem yourself (with some assistance from folks on forums) then you will attain a greater understanding and you are more likely to reach that AHA! moment where everything clicks in to place in your mind. And what a joy that feeling is!

ASP.NET MVC Framework Preview - A review

Colin Angus Mackay — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 19:56:39 GMT

I've just finished reading Steven Sanderson's book ASP.NET MVC Framework Preview published by APress. While the book was short I felt it did give me a bit of an introduction to ASP.NET MVC. Although I have to admit that I could have probably got that from reading a number of articles.

The book is split in to a number of areas that could be summarised as Why? How? and Where? The Why? (chapter 1) describes why you would want to use ASP.NET MVC over traditional ASP.NET*. The How? (chapter 2) describes how you would create a web application with ASP.NET MVC and the Where? (chapter 3) describes the other architecture that ASP.NET MVC fits in with. Then, finally, there is an appendix that describes some of the new language features of C# 3.0 and I felt that this was added just to try and bulk the book out a little bit.

I have to admit that when I first opened the package containing the book I was a little disappointed by the size. When I opened the book I was more disappointed when I saw that, conversely, the font size was larger than I was expecting too.

If you already have an idea that you want to use ASP.NET MVC and why then chapter 1 can easily be skipped. If you are already familiar with n-tier development, ORM, IoC, unit testing and so on then chapter 3 can be skimmed quite quickly. That leaves the real meat of the book just in the 30 pages that is chapter 2.

Despite all the negative things that I have said up to this point, I rather like Steven's writing style. It is clear and and easy to follow. There are a fair number of footnotes for clarification or to point you off in the direction of more information that is outside the scope of the book. He's given enough information that a person could confidently make a stab at creating a starter application using ASP.NET MVC without too much trouble.

In short, I'm looking forward to Steven Sanderson's 500 page and hopefully much more in depth Pro ASP.NET MVC book coming out in January 2009.

* I think this is where terminology is going to get slightly confusing. We already talk about "Classic ASP" when referring to ASP as it was before .NET came along. Now we have "Traditional ASP.NET" to refer to ASP.NET before MVC. Of course, traditional ASP.NET isn't going away, just as the traditional songs I was taught at school haven't gone away just because a bunch of rock-stars have come along and created new songs. (I was going to say pop-stars, then I realised they don't tend to write their own songs these days)

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET MVC,MCV,APress,book review

Some advice on CVs

Colin Angus Mackay — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:56:31 GMT

As a lead developer part of my job is to review CVs for developers that we are potentially going to hire. There are, however, some people that I think do put the most inappropriate things on their CV. I'm not talking about the really obviously inappropriate stuff like admitting you won some competition in an Ibiza nightclub on an 18-30 holiday, I've not seen anything a salacious as that. I'm talking about the inappropriate things that sound like they should probably be on a CV.

There have been various reports in the media recently about identity theft and CVs. And yet, I still get emails from people with all sorts of personal information in them. I imagine that recruitment agents get even more than I do. But, if you are sending off your CV can you really be sure that you are sending it to a legitimate source?

There is nothing stopping an identity thief setting themselves up as a fake company and posting job adverts. With a website and a number of job adverts posted around an identity thief could receive hundreds of CVs all containing some very personal information.

Recently I've received CVs containing details such as Date of Birth, Address, various government Identifiers (National Insurance numbers, driving license, SSN, Passport numbers, etc.), marital status and so on. Enough for someone to steal the candidate's identity.

In the UK we have various bits of legislation that mean we are not permitted to discriminate on grounds of age, gender, martial status, race, etc. There is therefore no need to put any of that information on your CV. In fact, some hiring managers might dismiss your CV immediately if it includes information like that because they don't want to be seen to discriminate in that area.

So what sort of information should you put on the CV?

First, this is obviously just my opinion and some of it is limited to software development roles.

I'm interested in your experience, if you have less than 5 years experience as a developer telling me about any formal education is also useful. After 5 years just some one-liners about your formal education will be sufficient. If you did a computing/computer science/software engineering degree then give some information about your final year project (and the vast majority of university course do) then give some information about that. Obviously, if your final year project was a bit vacuous then you might want to hide it.

Any recent training is also useful, and I do mean recent. If it is older than about 36 months then leave it out. Also, it needs to be relevant. Telling me about the evening classes you took in pottery last year may be interesting to you, but it has nothing to do with software development so leave it out, or move it to your hobbies section.

If you have won any worthwhile awards or if you do volunteer work put that in too. If you have given any presentations at conferences or user groups, written any articles, maintain a blog or personal website then put these things in. If you run a web site that is less than employer friendly then make sure you do that under a pseudonym that can't be tracked back to you, it might hurt your chances, remember that includes your WHOIS entry.

External hobbies and interests can be useful on a CV, and other people think they are a waste of space. I like to see what other things you are interested in, but I'm not going to be too fussed if you don't include it.

Finally, make sure that you actually include contact information. Just your name, email and phone number is good enough at this stage.

Training Developers

Colin Angus Mackay — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:06:35 GMT

Software development is a very fast moving business and it is therefore vitally important to keep up with what is happening with technology. If you don't you could be left behind pretty quickly. When the proverbial hits the fan you don't want to be left behind.

If you remember back to your school days you might remember Æsop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper. The grasshopper did no work in the summer while the ant worked hard in preparation of the lean times. When the lean times came the ant was able to provide for himself, while the grasshopper starved. A lot of software developers are like the grasshopper, they are not planning for their future. You might think it unfair of me to tar all developers with that brush, but I don't mean to. I did say "a lot" not "all". So why do I think that?

Last year I spent three months trying to hire a developer. I was shocked at the number of developers that I saw had the attitude that they didn't need to learn anything unless their employer put them on a training course. Some seemed surprised when I asked how they kept up to date with the industry they are in. Most just mumbled something about reading books and articles online. Given the answers to other questions I don't think they spent all that much time reading.

Software development knowledge fades faster than ever these days. It seems like only yesterday that I was learning .NET 1.0, yet .NET 4.0 is just around the corner. In a couple of years I'll be using it commercially. Technologies like LINQ to SQL which has only been released will be dead soon, if recent reports are to be believed. That's a lot of new information to take in only for it to go stale. This week I'm immersing myself in ASP.NET MVC. I've been to a talk on the subject at it looks like that's the way forward so I want to be at the head of the pack. I'll also be taking a first look at Subversion this week also. On top of that I've got a stack of other things to get through.

When I left university I had the arrogance to think that I knew it all and for a few years I worked on that principle. But that attitude eventually caught up with me and I spent some time unemployed partly as a result of that attitude. I am determined not to let that happen again. These days I am acutely aware of what I don't know. I think that now I am more aware of my limitations I am a better developer. Because I'm more aware of what I don't know I strive to fill those gaps by ensuring my own education - I don't let an employer dictate what I should be learning. I am pro-active and go out there and ensure I'm educated. Of course, if my employer wants to put me on a specific training course I'll accept it.

I did a little calculation last weekend that surprised me. Actually it shocked the heck out of me. Last year my employer spend roughly £200 on training materials for me. However, I spent a lot more. Of the things that I can remember (so I suppose the things that were worth it) I spent £2500 on my own education.

So, who gets the benefit out of this? For the most part my employer gets the benefit. While I enjoy developing software, it is my employer that profits from it at the end of the day.

Most employer attitudes to training developers are that it isn't worth it because the developer will just leave with the additional knowledge they've received for a higher salary else where. Well, I suppose they will if the employer has that kind of cynical attitude. Employers think that they have to find a replacement soon so why bother training a developer only for another company to take advantage of that. But the a lot of the knowledge that is walking out the door cannot be replaced easily. A lot of the knowledge walking out the door is about the employer's business and that is unique. You can't hire that in.

There are a number of "solutions" to this problem. Some employers go for the stick method. "If I train you up and you leave within X months then you have to pay part of the training costs back." The disturbing thing is that I used to think that was an acceptable solution. But it really isn't. It is a form of financial handcuffs, and the developer being trained is going to resent it. Quite possibly they'll be off as soon as the handcuffs are removed or simply not accept the training.

The more reasonable attitude, I think, to take about training is to realise that the developer that's just been trained has increased their market value. So, pay market value for the developer. You don't necessarily have to do it straight away, give the training time to sink in if you want, but do increase the developers salary within a few months and don't tie it to anything else. Don't roll it in with inflation based increase, an annual increase, or other bonus schemes. Make it very clear that the increase is solely as a result of the greater ability or productivity as a result of the training previously received.