Donna L Davis's blog

Hiring managers want to hire people with hard skills, like .NET experience, surely. But they also want to hire people who have professional identity.

I work in an organization where the promotion, as most of us know it, does not exist. The trouble with this system is that employees have to put their pride on the line to apply for a position, wondering if management has someone in mind and if they are simply wasting their time by filling out the tedious paperwork.

Here's a topic that can be embraced with vigor. It's almost as easy as enumerating "favorite things" in that song from The Sound of Music but without the schnitzel with noodles. The only question is where to begin. Who hasn't had an IT manager get on their last nerve?

What do Marilyn Monroe, eleven U.S presidents, Charles Lindbergh, the Prince of Wales, and a humble DeveloperDotStar blogger have in common? They were all guests at the famous Hotel Del Coronado, built in 1888, located near San Diego. However, only the latter can claim to have visited during a CIO 100 Symposium.

Sated from too much cruise-ship food and an obscene amount of postcard-style scenery, I interrupted my husband with a "Shhhh...can't you tell I'm trying to eavesdrop? The lady on the back row just said she works for Microsoft..."

Faithful d.* readers know that one our bloggers here has mentioned, upon occasion, that he assisted John Nash. Still, I was compelled to slap my husband and exclaim last night while I reading in bed, when on page 350 of Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind I stumbled across the following passage.

As customers we know that Microsoft's target dates have been fluid a time or two and some tolerance exists for shipping product with bugs. Yet, Microsoft knows that we know that and was still willing to invite guests into the house with dishes in the sink.

Turner wowed the audience by resizing a form, demonstrating that all the form elements (buttons, listboxes, etc.) dynamically resized and maintained their relative positions (without code).

Orlando is synonymous with glitzy, dollar-hungry theme-parks, slick time-share marketing, and all-the-sunshine-you-can-tolerate-and-then-some. VSLive is at home in Orlando.

If your circumstances have placed you in a position where you feel your skills atrophying, either you need to change your habits or resign yourself to basking in the laurels (as John Mellencamp likes to say) of your former glory days.

VS 2005 knowledge via osmosis...programming skills by proximity.

In our attempts to build systems that do just about everything, we lost the rote reliability inherent in machinery. It was supposed to be a 0 or 1, wasn’t it? Not .5. Certainly not mysterious blue.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by James H. Maynard, Chairman and CEO of Investors Management Corp and its primary subsidiary, the Golden Corral Corporation. His topic was "Chase Your Dream! How an idea was turned into a billion-dollar company." What has that to do with your career in software development? Surprisingly, quite a bit. Chew the meat and spit out the fat as I recount a buffet of career advice served up by a successful visionary.

A review of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt. Leavitt's biography regales readers with back story, including idiosyncrasies and horror stories associated not only with Turing, but some of his contemporaries.

I cringe every time I read the words "computer glitch" as the alleged cause for everything from election screw-ups to health plan fiascos. The "computer glitch" scapegoat ranks right up there with the infamous line: "Mistakes were made." Disembodied responsibility.