For people who have heard, I recently started a new position as a developer at ContextWeb. ContextWeb is a targeted/contextual advertising provider and exchange, and recently embarked on a technical re-architecture moving from C# to Java, moving from DBs to Hadoop, running a SCRUM/Agile environment with a bunch of pretty sharp people, free coffee, soft drinks, and a decent benefits package.

If you’re interested in working in downtown NY, I’ve linked in some of the open spots below, you can apply directly or forward your resume through me – let me know either way and I’ll put a good word in for you, maybe get you in to meet some people:

• Sr. Java Developer, Server Systems (working on my team)
• Sr. Java Developer, Data Processing/Hadoop
• Software Development Manager, Server Systems (be my boss)

Google releases Wave protocol implementation source code – Ars Technica: “At the Google I/O conference earlier this year, the search giant revealed an intriguing new communication service called Wave that aims to deliver concurrent messaging and collaborative editing in a single cohesive environment. The underlying Wave Federation Protocol is designed to make it possible for third parties to host their own interoperable Wave instances. Google intends to open the source code of its own implementation in order to encourage widespread adoption of the protocol. The company took its first major steps in that direction on Friday by releasing the source code of its Operational Transform (OT) code and a simple client/server reference implementation that is built on top of the protocol. This code, which is available under the open source Apache Software License, will give developers a way to start experimenting with the protocol and potentially even building their own Wave-compatible services.”

(Via http://arstechnica.com.)

I hate to hop on the bandwagon, but I have to admit – Wave looks like the most revolutionary item I’ve seen in a while – in a full-on game changer sense. Not so much just because of the cool widgetry that Google’s built, but because it’s a protocol – with the flexibility and potential that implies.

Building on some of the interactions we’ve seen with IM, Blogging/Trackbacks, Twitter, and other messaging, Wave looks to standardize, federate, and embed real-time, multiparty communications to the point where it will become part of the fabric of the web. If Web 2.0 = comments and trackback conversations – this feels a lot more like Web 2.5 – the implementation we really wanted when we first tried to take the web from a document-based publishing platform to a conversation-enabled collaborative medium.

And… Open-Source production-quality reference implementation – what could be better. I have to say, not an small number of my off-work hours are going to be spent looking at embedding Wave into… everything… Particularly given that Federation (though still a little nebulous) is a first-class citizen in the platform.

According to Safari 4 this blog is back on the Google malware list, though the Google Website Owner tools (which look neat) don’t appear to flag any warnings, and it’s not clear why that would be the case. The report sounds pretty innocuous, though oddly it shows up as being for: 74.222.134.0, which nslookup doesn’t report as the IP for http://jay.shao.org

What is the current listing status for jay.shao.org?

This site is not currently listed as suspicious.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 2 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-06-05, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS26347 (DREAMHOST).

Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?

Over the past 90 days, jay.shao.org did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.

Has this site hosted malware?

No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

Next steps:

• Return to the previous page.
• If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Blackboard buys Angel Learning – Washington Business Journal “Education software maker Blackboard Inc., which was losing money a year ago, reported a break-even quarter and announced plans to acquire fellow education software maker Angel Learning Inc. for $95 million in cash and stock.”

Another one bites the dust…

We’ve been looking at expanding our development team (contact me if you’re an awesome developer, passionate about what you do, and like people and work) and so I’ve been screening a lot of resumes and CVs recently. If you’re a candidate, keep reading and tell me in your interview you read this. If you’re just interested, keep reading, though this is really just my opinions, combined with some rants.

Things I look for in resumes:

• Strong command of written & colloquial English (see below for more)
• Experience spanning multiple vendors, platforms, open-source, etc
• Specific accomplishments (less ‘managed/coordinated’ more ‘wrote/implemented’)

Things that are likely to put me off:

• Excessive keywords/technologies (with no examples)
• Cut and pasted roles/responsibilities for projects (e.g. every role listed)
• More experience with a technology than it’s been in existence
• Obvious grammatical/spelling/usage errors

It somewhat surprised me after thinking about it how little time/credence I give to scanning technologies listed by candidates. (I do read them, but mostly looking for items that show strong willingness to explore or personal preference; e.g. Grails, Git, IntelliJ). What really excites me for hiring say a Java developer is someone who’s also done, say Javascript, Ruby, scripting, C++, and has some great project samples of things they’ve done for projects where they came up with something clever, or leveraged a neat toolkit to solve some problem.

Really what I’m looking for generally boils down to 2 main factors: communication skills and passion.

Communication Skills: I increasingly view resumes/CVs as an expression of an individual’s ability to communicate in a technical forum. The quality of your resume reflects your ability to write requirements, express technical/design concepts, and communicate with customers. We work in an environment where the first impression people have of you increasingly comes via email, a written document, or some other non-verbal communication. With distributed teams becoming more common, the ability to clearly and accurately communicate without the luxury of all the bandwidth you have in personal settings becomes even more important.

Passion: I want to see some combination of jobs, project accomplishments, technologies, and familiarity with techniques that let me know you’re passionate for both delivering good software, and becoming better at the craft of software engineering. I like to see technologies like open-source libraries, frameworks, projects, and other tools that show you’ve investigated what’s out there in the course of your work. Practices like TDD, Agile, UCD, or others that show you’re continually looking to try, and adopt better ways of working are also a strong plus.

If those pieces are there, then I strongly believe the other fundamentals will follow, which makes it much more likely that someone will get an interview to see if things click in terms of team dynamics and the needs of a specific position.

ITWeb :Unisa embraces Microsoft: “[ Johannesburg, 3 December 2008 ] – At a time when many public organisations are migrating to open source solutions – the University of SA (Unisa) has chosen to embrace Microsoft. From 2009, registered students at Unisa will be required to sign up for a Microsoft-provided e-mail service. The free e-mail system – myLife – will be the only system Unisa will use to communicate with its students. This marks a move away from the university’s Sakai community source platform – myUnisa – which the university runs on a Linux platform.”

(Via car hire bulgariaGoogle.)

Based on the article at least (not having talked with the folks at UNISA about this item) it’s hard to tie moving to Live@EDU for email to moving away from Sakai. If anything, having guaranteed email accounts (which it sounds like may not currently be the case) seems likely to enhance core services like announcements, email notification, mailing lists and others.

ландшафт. the exhaustion that was the combined CampusEAI Portlets2008 and Annual conference is now behind us, and it seems like time for some reflections and observations. Hopefully some of these items will be items which I expand upon at a future date, but in no particular order, dumped straight from my brain:

• JSR-168 is here! Everyone really wants to write good standards compliant portlets. Architecture and engineering is a harder sell (or at least the time/cost trade-off) but there’s wide consensus that standard portlets are the way forward — at least excepting a couple of us widget fans
• SOA is something people are interested in, but that there’s been relatively little forward progress on. Some is governance. Some is tools (SOAP, WSDL, and what’s this REST thing?). Some is just that it’s big and strategic, and there’s many tactical must haves. I suspect some of it is also that much of our interesting data/services are locked in vendor platforms that have shown little interest in opening up. Though, a small trend does exist of creating SOA-style services to reach into vendor platforms and extract data from them
• Mobile wasn’t as big as I thought it would be. Not sure why. Most people seem to be interested in the abstract, but with few concrete plans. Maybe my iPhone has clouded my vision, but I do wonder if we’re going to get blindsided come fall — our target demographic is basically 18-22 year olds, afterall…
• AJAX in portlets is still hard. There are some tricks like wrapper divs, namespacing, and builtin support and integration patterns, but it’s still not a common practice.
• Identity Management is big. Governance is a big thorny issue, though many IT departments are rolling out vendor products from big players (Oracle, Sun, a little IBM) in the interim, tho ugh the exact scope of those items is somewhat unclear.
• Oracle is really putting portlets in lots of interesting places. Webcenter. Product mashups. Inside BI tools, and other GUI devices. I think they’ve probably embraced the architecture more than any other major vendor which is an interesting trend.
• Lots of awareness, and wanting to look at uPortal 3. Ooohs and ahhs over both the AJAX D&D, and maybe more importantly the new content adding UI — good going Jen!
• Really beautiful portals — some, though not all new portals really seem to be breaking out of the lots of boxes approach, or at least wrapping it in neat functionality like Boston College’s Agora design. Nifty trend. Sign of maturity?
• Community Development is hard. Aligning roadmaps, agreeing on implementation strategies, and putting all the pieces together is challenging. Even more so, justifying “doing it right” (and fit to share) versus quick and dirty, or getting a student up and running was a big trend. Makes my inner-engineer quail, but my inner-economist says that throw-away code lowers the barrier for solving problems, which is a good thing. Evolution isn’t always pretty and all that.
• Lots of desire for training, best practices, and advice on policy and governance. Real role for communities of practice, not just code and software.
• Increasing interest in “Enterprise Learning Management”. Lots of worries about migration, but the beginning of seeds wondering whether our current platforms are sufficient for a foundation for the next 10-15 years, and University strategic goals. Of course, some of this is the “enterprise IT guys” getting pulled into the LMS discussion for perhaps the first time in many places.
• Good beer is key to facilitating interesting non-session discussion. Content is king on the program, but largely only because it gets people in one place and produces interesting spontaneous interactions. Hands-on is something everyone wants, but it’s not clear a conference composed of many 1 hour sessions is the right format to deliver it.
• University IT teams wear many, many hats.
• British Universities seem to have a much richer and more abundent IT project management structure than (most) American schools. Really interesting thread about Imperial College in London blending ITIL and Agile methodologies.

Ira Fuchs from Mellon is talking about Community Source, and the larger dynamic within the community — successes, attitudes, opportunities, and risks.

zotero is interesting, both as an example of an open-source project that like Firefox has had viral adoption, with a strong community marketing and communications effort. I also wonder if there’s a convincing Sakaibrary integration possibility, perhaps a direct gateway into the Citations Manager tool that let you save or push bookmarks into the citations manager.

Vertox – a plug-in for a plug-in is interesting. Video tagging is a neat application, though in many respect I’ve always thought the combination of OCR and voice recognition to auto index text & words mentioned in a clip, and index them would be potentially more transformative than manual tagging & citing.

Blackboard Won:This just in

A Texas jury has found Kitchener software company Desire2Learn Inc. guilty of infringing on an American competitor’s patent.The verdict, announced this afternoon, allows Blackboard Inc. to demand a ban on sales of Desire2Learn’s products in the United States.

(Via e-Literate.)Michael F. isn’t the only one who’s speechless at this decision. The precedent this sets is uncomfortable on many levels, despite the fact that both:

1. The patent itself looks to be well on the way to being invalidated
2. I doubt Desire2Learn will have any trouble getting more Amicus motions filed for them at any subsequent trials or appeals.

Desire2Learn has reassured their customers:

With your support and that of the entire educational community, we were able to present a strong case. While we are disappointed that the jury did not agree with our position, we will continue to challenge the patent’s validity and Blackboard’s charges of infringement. We are currently evaluating our next steps.The United States Patent and Trademark office has committed to reviewing the patent. As these activities take place we will provide you updates through our patent blog at www.Desire2Learn.com\Patentinfo.

(Via Desire2Learn)First off, addressing confusion and concerns I’ve heard expressed during conversations with a number of individuals: this decision in no way implies that Sakai infringes on any Blackboard IP. Additionally, both Sakai deployers and any Commercial Affiliate you may contract with for services are explicitly mentioned under Blackboard’s previous commitments not to sue Universities and open-source.So “all” we (the Sakai Community) have directly lost is freedom of choice and a small piece of the spirit of innovation in education. While I don’t live in the right district, drafting Lessig for Congress seems like a better idea all the time. I do wonder however, if Blackboard’s previous “pledge not to sue” open-source products and affiliates might have unexpected implications.Though open-source communities seem unlikely to play the FUD game, does this mean that cautious schools may have only 2 options: Blackboard products or open source? If you’re looking to upgrade an existing LMS or deploy a system for the first time, does this affect your decision making regarding product selection?I should also take the opportunity to point out that this kind of key vulnerability is exactly why the separation of licensing from commercial relationships is such a powerful dynamic. Desire2Learn is by all accounts an excellent company, whose customers are happy. No matter how good the company behind the product, however, choosing D2L as a platform also directly binds you to the fate of a single commercial entity. A company who can fail, be sued, bought (a la WebCT, eCollege), experience a strategy shift (Be Inc.), etc.Participating in a community (or to grab a phrase from Barak Obama “a movement”) like Sakai gives you tremendous long term advantages. You can get competitive bids from multiple vendors due the huge number of commercial affiliates. You can switch vendors if you’re unhappy without having to migrate your service. If Sakai moves in a direction not aligned with local interests you can choose to create your own fork or derivative product. Finally, in the same way that diversified investments allow you to reap the rewards of the stock market while lowering your overall risk — Sakai (and other open source products like Moodle, Atutor, etc.) allow you capitalize on eLearning technology without putting all your eggs in one basket.Update: Michael Korkuska (Sakai Executive Director) blogged about the decision and it’s impact on Sakai and the industry as well.

Well the questions are pouring in (mostly due to my tardiness in writing this kind of announcement) and so, without farther ado…

What Happened?

While it still feels a little strange to say it, as of 2 Fridays ago (2/8) I am no longer employed at Rutgers University. Over the last 9 years as first a student, then staff member, I’ve had the chance to: first study under, and then work with some incredible people. I’ve gotten to watch projects and services grow and evolve into solutions that are used every day by tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff.

Before addressing my personal situation, I feel the need to speak a bit about the Rutgers Sakai deployment which up until now has occupied so much of my thoughts and energy. I was fortunate enough to see myRutgers grew into a service providing tools and services to every student at Rutgers. Sakai usage is currently somewhere on that curve, with usage growing by leaps and bounds. This Spring’s semester in many ways feels like a qualitative shift in the nature of the service — marked by a huge increase in the number of students asking “where’s my class’s Sakai site.” This semester these questions are particularly significant, as many of them are coming from students in classes where either:

1. Class was not yet in session. This is a big change from the dynamic in previous semesters where students typically visited the first meeting of their class, and were then directed to visit the Sakai site. Now students are looking to visit the Sakai site to see the syllabus, readings, and get a leg up on going to that first class.
2. Their instructor had not created a site. Sakai seems poised to make the jump into ubiquity, as in some students minds it’s already there.

Now to handle the really common question — if the Rutgers Sakai deployment is so clearly poised for greatness, where am I going and why? Well…

Starting this past monday (2/11) I have taken a position with the CampusEAI Consortium, where I will be serving as the Director of Open Source Solutions. Recent years have seen a huge upswing in the popularity, and visibility of open and community source solutions in Higher Education. Sakai, uPortal, CAS, Kuali, and othes have garnered attention, awards, and deployments. Due to significant interest expressed by member institutions, CampusEAI is looking to complement its existing strengths on the Oracle platform with broader offerings in the open-source space.

Answers to some personal-ish questions:

Are you moving to Cleveland?

No, I’m going to be based out of NJ, though Continental is certainly getting a good chunk of my time for the next few months as I schlep back and forth.

What does Lisa think?

She’s excited. Well, more excited when I’ve been gone < 2 days as opposed to > 3 days…

What do the kids think?

The kids are still getting used to not picking me up at Rutgers. They think it’s really funny that daddy works somewhere they can’t see. Sunday nights are hard. Phone calls are bittersweet. Coming back is good.

Aren’t you on the JA-SIG Board?

Yes. When my career change became definite I notified the board at the January video call. JA-SIG has always been a community of volunteers (stellar volunteers more often than not) and particular given my new employer’s willingness to continue backing my involvement in JA-SIG it was felt that there were no significant barriers to my continuing to serve in this capacity. As always, JA-SIG

So… is your Rutgers job open?

Yes. Though (see below) I’m hiring too…

What’ll I be doing?

So what does this mean in concrete terms? My personal definition is pretty simple. We’re looking to help members deploy solutions built on open source software. Given my background, Sakai, uPortal, CAS, and maybe even Kuali are obvious possibilities. I think however, that it’s a broader story than just support for deploying a few specific products. Many institutions have experienced challenges in building around open-source due to shortages in staffing or specific skill-sets. Others have successfully deployed open-source solutions, but been burned trying to deepen integration, or due to staff turnover (a problem which I should note also happens around commercial solutions). So the goal of this new unit is to make deploying solutions built on open-source:

1. Easy
2. Cost Effective
3. Low Risk
4. Sustainable
5. Did I say easy?

Basically the goal is to allow schools to leverage the strengths inherent in the open-source development model:

• Try before buy
• Rational licensing and cost-containment (instead of getting wracked with heavy licensing burdens as you get “too successful”)
• Open implementations, generally of open standards
• Economy of scale versus custom developed institution-specific software
• Freedom from vendor roadmaps and strategy shifts — even to go as far as obtain competitive bids from multiple vendors on the same solutions
• Peer interaction with really bright people working hard to solve the same problems you see

So that’s the goal. Make open-source easier, removing barriers for schools large & small — the kind of topics that have continually been commented on lists, in journals, and at conferences. Reducing installation pain. Helping with patch management. Providing support and training. Taking the pain and risk out of going open-source, all while working to make strategic contributions to enable the production of more good software.

It should be exciting.

P.S. Did I mention we’re hiring? Drop an email talking about your love for open-source, and how you really want to join in making it easier: jason_shao@campuseai.org. Oh, and mention you saw the posting in my blog