Get to know some of our talented authors featured in our author spotlights. You can see interviews, detailed biographies, and book summaries of some of the best in the industry.
GWYER: I’m Architect for the Server Products team at eRide, inc. (http://www.eride-inc.com), a Global Positioning System (GPS) start-up, based in San Francisco. We are developing a server-assisted Global Positioning System that uses internally developed hardware and software with extremely low sensitivity and first time to acquisition.
Originally from the UK, I went to Newcastle and Norwich to study Economics. After a brief stint at UC Davis in a Ph.D. program, I realized that programming has always been my true calling and moved to San Francisco shortly thereafter. That was about eight years ago.
GWYER:While interviewing in the past, I have taken some really mundane non-standard technical tests with very little feedback. In ReviewNet, I see enormous potential for all types of organizations to adequately determine both the relative and absolute skills of applicants in a standard manner. Also, I’ve always enjoyed writing tests. The first academic tests I wrote were in Peshawar, Pakistan where I was teaching dBase programming to computer engineers of the Agricultural Survey Division in the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan.
GWYER: I tried to write questions in such a way that anyone answering would be able to learn something even if they chose the wrong answer. This generally means phrasing the question in such a way that three of the answers were correct, one partial and one wrong. I found this makes the question much more difficult to write, but definitely more challenging also.
GWYER: I am proud of the work that I have completed so far at eRide, which has involved a considerable amount of designing and architecting for the Server Products team. I have written thread pools, session and socket managers, and an “agent framework”, all of which are fine-tuned/optimized to handle large numbers of concurrent clients. This, and working with some really smart people to build what is likely to be a revolutionary technology (coming to a cell-phone near you!) is probably my biggest professional accomplishment to date.
GWYER: I buy a lot of Java books, read a lot on the internet, and subscribe to technical newsgroups. I am always trying to predict the next greatest thing in technology; to try to be there when the wave starts to take off. It also helps to have friends working in different areas of the technology industry in Silicon Valley.
GWYER: The test I was assigned to write covers all aspects with regard to using the Java Swing and AWT API. This API is used to write Java Graphical User Interfaces (GUI’s). Java is a great language for writing GUI’s because it runs on all platforms, including Windows, Linux, Macintosh, etc. The eighty questions I wrote reflects my work experience writing GUIs in the software industry over the last seven years. The questions are wide-ranging and include gathering UI requirements, commonly used design patterns, the Model View Controller framework, and the fundamental parts of the Swing and AWT API’s.
GWYER: Learning Java takes time and unfortunately there is no substitute for experience using the language. It helps enormously if you have used an OOP language before but otherwise I would recommend sitting down and learning as much as possible about the semantics and technical jargon associated with Java. It is relatively easy to learn to use many parts of the Java API, but in my opinion there is no substitute for a solid foundation of semantics
GWYER: The SWING API has served its purpose well by allowing developers to create GUI applications that run consistently across multiple platforms. I don’t know any language other than Java that allows you to do this. However there are still minor performance problems when using Java for GUI, as compared to native GUI applications. I hope that Sun MicroSystems will eradicate some of the niggling problems that Java GUI developers still face.
GWYER: After one year in a Ph.D program in Applied Economics at Davis, I realized that the mathematical aspects of the program were being too rigidly empasized at the expense of the social science aspect for my liking. Just about that time (1994), the Californian economy had really begun to take off. Both this and the discovery of the internet brought me to my first job as a financial software engineer at Vestek System in San Francisco where I made my first break into the commercial world of software. Since that time, I have worked primarily as a contractor in Java.
GWYER: I’ve been on both sides of the interview table and therefore have a good appreciation of how difficult it is to evaluate the technical aptitude of a candidate for a specific job. Typically interviewee tests are non-standard and provide little if any feedback. I am impressed with the thoroughness given to each questions developed by ReviewNet. The ReviewNet questions that I have reviewed, and the ones I have authored will definitely assist in determining if a candidate really does have the appropriate technical experience or background for the job.
GWYER: I tried to write tests that covered the fundamental aspects of the Java GUI without trying to trick the interviewee with ambiguously worded questions.
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