That was so until recently, when I discovered increasingly popular job sites codeeval and interviewstreet. They are different from other job offering sites in means that they allow their users to participate in solving various challenges and earn achievements or job offers from great companies. In this way at the same time you’re becoming a better developer and can instantly evaluate how “good” you are based on how many challenges you solve or based on the offers you get. Isn’t that great? Even if you currently have a great job they are really great for practicing and who knows when you might need your achievements.

Serbia, Europe

Nis, Serbia

The town of Nis (Niš, pronounced Niche) with its population of over 300,000 people is the University center of the South Serbia. South Serbia is the region with the lowest average salaries, broken industry (including EI Nis electronics which was the symbol of my town 20 years ago), it is often forgotten by government centered around Belgrade, etc. etc (there are numerous places in Serbian language containing more detailed ramblings (complaints mostly) on the current state in the region).

Being an optimist I tend to think that this hard economical situation has positively influenced the development of IT sector. There are numerous IT companies in Nis which are outsourcing partners of US and European companies (for example Accordia, Seavus, Youngculture). There are also companies that have their own products such as MotionDSP’s video enhancment products or Atomia’s server and hosting automation platform (they were also one of the Gold Sponsors of 2011 HostingCon). Please note that the above mentioned companies do not necessarily originate nor are completely located in Nis but have significant development resources located there. Also there are many freelancers including Genius-Tech, Disample, or individuals like me who work from home. I’ve noticed that on elance.com freelancers from Nis are the majority of Serbian freelancers. For a more thorough list of IT companies in Nis take a look at the table below. The given list is unofficial and probably incomplete but helps in getting the overall picture. I’ll update the list with new info from time to time.

*No of employees in software department

**it is recognized among developers as the worst IT company in the region

Please note: This table should be observed from a developers point of view -> potential employment opportunities. Therefore the employee numbers given represent the number of developers that work in Nis even though company could be located elsewhere. It is the same for technology column.

Update: I have updated employee numbers for Seavus, Horisen, Youngculture, SmartNet (Thanks for corrections)

Update 2: Added dualsoft and corrected info about youngculture having office in Novi Sad

Update 3: Updated employee number for Seavus from 25 to 58. Apparently the information I had before was too old.

Update 4: Added Energosoft and updated employee number for ING Software from 5 to 7

Update 5: Corrected info about logik

Update 6: Added Kraftwerk, Diyomi, EtonDigital, Megalink

Update 7: Added FutureForward, corrected info on Megalink (megatrend actually)

The information about salaries is not given for obvious reasons, but for Nis they are within range 300e - 1500e net (for gross value add 40% to that number). Approximately 90% of developers have less than 1000e.

For more details about any of the above mentioned company you can check with provided links or you can contact me (email: sfsgagi attt gmail dottt com or on twitter @draganstankovic) and I would be very glad to help in making contact for you or to direct you in the proper way.

It’s good to be a developer in Nis

Nevertheless, since I had to fulfill my time with something other than staring at empty space (I travel by night) I tried listening to some podcasts and since then I haven’t stopped to follow the ones that I liked the most.

In my opinion (being a Java developer most of the time), Java posse is the best podcast around. The guys behind it are very amusing, have different characters (opinions), and often make a roundups on hot topics where they include more people in discussions. For example, episode #337 they made together with guys from .net rocks which is I guess the best podcast for .net developers.

Apart from Java posse I like listening to grails podcast although they are not as regular with new stuff as Java posse is.

In near future I plan to check some python or ruby podcasts and compare their awesomeness to Java posse.

Try listening to any podcast for developers and you won’t regret. The feeling you’ll probably have is like you have found yourself a good developer friend who is willing to share his personal insights and programming knowledge with you. At least that is how it was in my case.

This is the list I populated in the last 3 years. Whenever I got an idea about something (in 99% it is IT/web/app stuff) that could be interesting to be done but may lead to startup company or something that can be done out of pure altruism I’ve written it to my tadalist. This tadalist helped me to reduce my frustration of not having time to work on “my stuff” and fear of forgetting what I wanted to do.

Today, I looked at this list to pick the best ideas and could easily enlist a few (actually six which are marked with green arrows on image below). Sadly, I’ve only managed to make some progress on only two items (out of 70 something) and even that small progress didn’t happened until recently.

I guess I am a bad executor but I am improving myself.

I wonder how many people have more/less ideas and what is their execution rate. Also, although I am not 18 for more than a decade, what do you think “Do I have potential?”

my startup ideas

So, I came across http://dbunit.sourceforge.net/ which allowed me to backup my database to xml file.

The routine is rather simple (please note the escape parameter setting which is required if (like in my case) author of legacy code you have to use put ‘table’ or some other odd name as a column name :

public void saveDb(OutputStream os) 
   throws DatabaseUnitException, SQLException, IOException {
 
   IDatabaseConnection connection = new DatabaseConnection(getConnection());
   DatabaseConfig config = connection.getConfig();
   config.setProperty(DatabaseConfig.PROPERTY_DATATYPE_FACTORY, 
      new MySqlDataTypeFactory());
   config.setProperty(DatabaseConfig.PROPERTY_METADATA_HANDLER, 
      new MySqlMetadataHandler());
   config.setProperty(DatabaseConfig.PROPERTY_ESCAPE_PATTERN, "`?`");
 
   IDataSet fullDataSet = connection.createDataSet();
   DefaultTableFilter tableFilter = new DefaultTableFilter();
   tableFilter.excludeTable("ignoredtable*");
 
   IDataSet filteredDataSet = new FilteredDataSet(tableFilter, fullDataSet);
   FlatXmlDataSet.write(filteredDataSet, os);
 
}

Then, when I wanted to restore it with:

public void restoreDb() throws Exception {
 
   IDatabaseConnection connection = new DatabaseConnection(db.getConnection());
   DatabaseConfig config = connection.getConfig();
   config.setProperty(DatabaseConfig.PROPERTY_DATATYPE_FACTORY, 
      new MySqlDataTypeFactory());
   config.setProperty(DatabaseConfig.PROPERTY_METADATA_HANDLER, 
      new MySqlMetadataHandler());
   config.setProperty(DatabaseConfig.PROPERTY_ESCAPE_PATTERN, "`?`");
 
   IDataSet dataSet = new FlatXmlDataSetBuilder().build(new File(fileName));
 
   DatabaseOperation.DELETE_ALL.execute(connection, dataSet);
   DatabaseOperation.REFRESH.execute(connection, dataSet);
}

This method wont’t work if you have a table without primary key or oddly defined composite keys. It will throw: org.dbunit.dataset.NoPrimaryKeyException

The solution is to add primary key filter configuration option like this:

config.setProperty(DatabaseConfig.PROPERTY_PRIMARY_KEY_FILTER, new IColumnFilter() {
 
 Map<String, List<String>> tablePrimaryKeyMap = new HashMap<String, List<String>>();
   {
      tablePrimaryKeyMap.put("table_with_composite1",
         Arrays.asList(new String[] { "composite_part1", "composite_part2" }));
      tablePrimaryKeyMap.put("table_with_composite2",
       Arrays.asList(new String[] { "other_part1", "other_part2", "other_part3" }));
      // ...
   }
 
   @Override
   public boolean accept(String tableName, Column column) {
      if (tablePrimaryKeyMap.containsKey(tableName)) {
         return tablePrimaryKeyMap.get(tableName).contains(column.getColumnName());
      } else {
         // you can add default handling if for example all
         // other table ids are named as 'id'
         return column.getColumnName().equalsIgnoreCase("id");
      }
   }
});

And that’s it. Yee!

yum install tomcat5 went really well and then I had to add webapps and manager packages with separate commands.

tomcat5 package depends on jdk-1.4 so in case you haven’t already installed a more recent version of java you’ll get this one.

I used the tutorial from http://www.jroller.com/gmazza/entry/web_service_tutorial to set up the options for deploying to tomcat using maven and that went well, but jdk-1.4 was causing spring context loader to throw:

SEVERE: Exception sending context initialized event to listener instance of
class org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org.springframework.core.CollectionFactory
at java.lang.Class.initializeClass(libgcj.so.7rh)
...

and the actual error displayed when I tried to access the service from the browser was:

threw exception javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactoryConfigurationError:
Provider org.apache.xalan.processor.TransformerFactoryImpl not found  at
javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory.newInstance(Unknown Source)  at
org.apache.cxf.helpers.XMLUtils.newTransformer(XMLUtils.java:118)

This was solved by installing open-jdk 1.6 devel package with yum, but then another, trickier error appeared:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/xml/serializer/OutputPropertiesFactory
at org.apache.xalan.templates.OutputProperties.(OutputProperties.java:82)
at org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerIdentityImpl.(TransformerIdentityImpl.java:86)
...

At several links (here and there) I figured it out that it has something to do with xalan.jar which was unavailable to my service deployed on tomcat. A command:

yum list xerces* xalan* | grep installed

showed that I already had xalan-2.7.1 in my /usr/share/java so I tried with copying it to CATALINA_HOME/common/endorsed but that didn’t fix the problem. I also tried symlinking xalan.jar to that file but that didn’t work either.

In the end, at the link which appeared to be some forum’s archive I found that someone had problems similar to this and was advised revert to xalan-2.6 version. I’ve tried with jar in http://archive.apache.org/dist/xml/xalan-j/binaries/xalan-j_2_6_0-bin.zip and it worked.

Yeee “me happy”

It appears that demand for developers exceeds supply so it’s good to be developer these days so I am using this opportunity to remind young computer science graduates that they are sometimes badly taught that being a developer is like being a plain old dirty worker and that they should strive to become project managers or team leaders. Graduates should ask themselves if they have ever seen a job ad asking for managers and offering reward before making a decision to become “great managers the world will know of”

After all, the most important thing is to be happy in what you are doing. And in my opinion being developer makes you happy and forever young (at least in spirit).

(The illustrations below show Happy developer and Miserable manager)

The solution was eclipse support plugin.

Having that written down I hope I won’t forget it again.

The problem (with solution) is described here: http://rubyforge.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=27102&group_id=2030&atid=7929.

The cause of this problem is incorrect generation of viewbox by the base renderer. When you incorporate changes mentioned in the link above to RUBY_INSTALL\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\scruffy-0.2.6\lib\scruffy\renderers\base.rb you should be able to render correct graphs.

 
public boolean isMouseAboveHeaderPanel() {
System.out.println("HeaderPanel.isMouseAboveHeaderPanel() called from: "
+ Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace()[2].getClassName() + "."
+ Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace()[2].getMethodName());
 
// ...
 
}

In this way you trace not only current function but also you got information from where you entered that function. Of course to make things easier you should make some kind of a shortcut for entering this trace line. In Eclipse you can do that with code template:

System.out.println("${enclosing_type}.${enclosing_method}() called from: "
+ Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace()[2].getClassName() + "." 
+ Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace()[2].getMethodName());

This helped me in lot of situations, I hope that it will help you as well.