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Java Market Trends

Posted on April 4, 2006 by paulbrowne

Below is an extract of a report Distributed by Computer People. It’s a breakdown of all the Java Job Adverts for the last 6 months in the London Contract / Permanent Market. While it should be treated with caution as (a) it’s sales and marketing material and (b) the London / UK market will differ substiantially from Dublin. For example , I would not expect to see as many Sybase roles in Dublin as London, due to the use of Sybase in the London Financial markets.

Example from the figures: Of all java jobs advertised in the UK , 36,86% were also looking for J2EE (Enterprise Java) Skills.

22504 (36.86 %) J2EE
17476 (28.62 %) Oracle
16045 (26.28 %) UNIX
15510 (25.40 %) XML
15321 (25.10 %) SQL
15269 (25.01 %) C++
12815 (20.99 %) Finance
12370 (20.26 %) Banking
11152 (18.27 %) Graduate/Degree/BSc
10069 (16.49 %) OO
9465 (15.50 %) .NET
8413 (13.78 %) CSharp
8188 (13.41 %) JSP
7529 (12.33 %) Sybase
7340 (12.02 %) HTML
6940 (11.37 %) Investment Banking
6740 (11.04 %) UML
6606 (10.82 %) Front Office
6479 (10.61 %) Windows
6343 (10.39 %) SQL Server
5991 (9.81 %) Linux
5533 (9.06 %) Perl
5047 (8.27 %) WebLogic
4940 (8.09 %) JavaScript
4685 (7.67 %) Struts
4547 (7.45 %) EJB2
4456 (7.30 %) Servlets
4435 (7.26 %) Microsoft
4136 (6.77 %) VB
3892 (6.37 %) Fixed Income

Alan Cox coming soon to speak at the University of Limerick

Posted on April 1, 2006 by paulbrowne

And if you don’t know who Alan Cox is, check out the Wikipedia Entry on him.

Quote from the Wiki Pedia :

He (Alan)was once commonly regarded as being the “second in command” after Linus Torvalds himself.

More information is available on the ILUG site.

How to talk to your Boss about Agile

Posted on March 5, 2006 by paulbrowne

We’re giving a talk about ‘how to talk to your boss about agile‘ for the Irish .Net Developers Association next Tuesday in Buswells hotel Dublin.

More details (including the slides themselves, as a preview of what you are missing) are available here in powerpoint, openoffice, pdf and flash formats. The slides explain how 4 pictures of bridges can explain the difference between Ad-Hoc , Predictive, Agile and XP projects. No , really , you do want to check this out.

Links to a lot of the sites / articles / tools used in the presentation are here on Del.icio.us. More posts on this blog about using agile techniques on projects are here.

The Bridges are:

Old Drogheda Bridge from the 1200’s – Quick and Dirty or Ad-Hoc project. Got the job done , and fast . Was patched a load of times, but eventually fell down under the weight of the traffic.
New Drogheda Motorway Bridge – Predictive Projects. Very easy to specify what you want (I want a bridge going from A-B to carry a motorway) and very easy to know when you are finished.
Drogheda Railway Brigde – Agile. Once the longest Iron Girder bridge in the world.Built in the 1850’s and the spec has kept on changing since. This included a complete rebuild in 1925 without losing a single days traffic. How’s that for unit testing?
Bungee Jumping off bridge in Queenstown – Extreme Programming (XP). Great fun if you’re doing it (and can be pretty effective), but scary for anybody watching.

As a sample of some of the pictures (which include lego people showing everything that can go wrong on a team), check out the image below.

.
Image from
TheBrickTestament.