DZone launched a new microzone today that will focus on the evolving HTML5 standard, along with CSS3, ECMAScript, and other emerging web standards through blogs, tutorials, videos and news.

Check it out here: http://www.dzone.com/mz/html5

After the debacle on Sunday afternoon where all of the JavaOne conference attendees were turned back by the conference thugs at the doors to the Oracle Welcome Keynote, my expectations for Monday’s opening JavaOne Keynote were not high. The magnitude of the irony of calling the Sunday event the “Welcome” Keynote, but not allowing JavaOne attendees to watch it live makes my head spin. I have it on good authority though (I was actually allowed in because of my Press credentials), that once the JavaOne attendees had trudged back up the hill to the Hilton to “enjoy” the video feed, alcohol was found to be available and so it turned out to be one of the better Keynotes in spite of Oracle’s lack of hospitality.
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I am a full-time consultant who is available to engage with clients remotely or onsite anywhere in the world (I currently hold dual-citizenship between Australia and the United States).

To discuss your specific needs, please call me on +1.650.336.5877, or email me at craig@craigsdickson.com, or use this Contact form, or download a copy of my resume from this page.

The following is an overview of the services I provide to clients:

Software Development Process Improvement

• Coaching for Agile process evaluation, adoption or improvement, including Scrum, Lean, Kanban and Extreme Programming (XP)
• Definition, refinement and documentation of team processes and practices
• Definition of Quality Assurance and Quality Control standards
• Integration of defect tracking systems with other tools and processes
• Engagement with customers and requirements elicitation

Software Development Team Management

• Job Description authoring
• Salary range and benefits package definition
• New candidate acquisition and screening
• Team workspace design and office space evaluation
• Skills assessment of existing resources
• Collaboration strategies for teams

Vendor Management

• New vendor discovery and screening
• Vendor proposal reviews
• Offshore vendor management, including onsite visits and reviews
• One throat to choke multiple vendor management

Software Configuration Management (SCM)

• Introduction of an SCM system to teams not already using one (Subversion, Git, CVS etc)
• Subversion and CVS training
• Subversion and CVS server installation and configuration
• SCM process definition and documentation, including branching and merging processes
• SCM system migration, particularly CVS to Subversion

Build Management

• Implementation of Apache Maven and Apache Ant based build systems
• Automation of builds, particularly in relation to a Continuous Integration system like CruiseControl or Hudson
• Management and versioning of produced code artifacts, particularly in relation to an Artifact Repository like Nexus or Artifactory
• Release numbering strategies and Alpha and Beta customer release programs

Software Architecture & Design

• Enterprise-level system architecture definition, existing architecture reviews
• New database design and existing database design review
• Formal UML based architecture definition

Enterprise Java Development

• Specialist in full-stack JavaEE development
• Public API design and documentation for ISVs
• Web service development and integration
• Code reviews and performance tuning
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) design and implementation

Web Development

• HTML, JavaScript and CSS development
• Integration of AJAX style JavaScript libraries including GWT, JQuery and ExtJS
• Integration of Adobe Flash and Flex components

Automated Testing Strategies

• Introduction of tools like JUnit and Sellenium to teams that currently do not do any automated testing
• Integration of tests into automated build scripts and generation of metrics
• Static analysis of codebase quality

Mobile Development

• iPhone application design and development, specializing in integration to JavaEE based back ends
• Web based mobile development

Social Media Strategy

• Specializing in small to medium business that do not have dedicated in house Social Media resources
• Evaluation of current Social Media presence
• Recommendations for Social Media platforms based on particular business needs and goals
• Evaluation of Location based services in relation to business needs and goals

Once again, to discuss your needs and to find out how I can help you, please contact me by phone on +1.650.336.5877, by email at craig@craigsdickson.com, or simply use this Contact form. If you would like more detailed information regarding my experience and qualifications, you can download a current copy of my professional resume from this page.

In my previous article (Performance Tuning Resources For Web Clients) I discussed why you should care about the performance of your web client and then listed out some of the better places to go on the web to find information on how to go about tweaking your web clients to get that better performance. In this article I am going to dig a little deeper and call out specifically what I think are the Must-do-No-excuse-not-to-do-them-You-are-really-being-unprofessional-if-you-are-not-doing-them tweaks that you should be performing on every single one of your web development projects.
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Recently I have been doing some research on tweaking websites to make them faster (either in reality, or at least in appearance to the client). Specifically the research has been focused on the actual client tier interaction – requesting the page, downloading the assets and rendering the page in the browser. In this post I will document some of the better resources I have found, focusing on client-side tweaks, so these resources should be relevant no matter if you are a Java, PHP, .Net or any other flavor of developer.
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With the increased hype and focus on social media and social networking, many people are struggling with trying to keep their public/private lives, or their professional/personal lives separate. And for those people, I have some bad news – there can be only one You in social media!
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In a previous post (Apple MacBook Pro Memory Upgrade) I detailed the reasoning behind choosing to perform some upgrades on the MacBook Pros in my family instead of buying new ones. In this post I will go over the process needed to upgrade the hard drives to give us a little more room to move for the next couple of years and hopefully some performance improvements as well.
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Today, we’re releasing an early version of Google Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer.

http://blog.chromium.org/2009/09/introducing-google-chrome-frame.html

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• Twitter API Wiki
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• Trail: 2D Graphics (The Javaâ„¢ Tutorials)
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• Twitter4J – A Java library for the Twitter API
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