I have been doing nothing more than interviewing the last few weeks. The interviews have all been set-up by technology recruiters for the most part. I am finding that I am being sent to interview for jobs that are not under my skill-set for the most part. For instance I interviewed with a company who told me the position was a front end developer position. I could have completed the tasks required for this position however when I was on the call I was asked only one question about front-end development.

Have you ever used the Blueprint CSS Framework?

I had never heard of this nor had I heard of a CSS Framework. Really all CSS is are definitions so a framework struck me as odd. I was also interviewed by a Java Developer who said our backgrounds have nothing in common so he was not sure what to ask me for questions. This is when I went over my background and what I had been working on.

My question for my readers is this. Since most interviews are not asking technical questions, how can I probe for them to show the Interviewer that I have the knowledge necessary for the position? What are your thoughts and what have your experiences been?

Over the last few weeks I have had potential employers ask to see a code sample. I have not had any recent code that I could share and out of all the code samples I have written the one that got the most inquiries was the YellowPages Content Grabber. This code does not work any longer however. The code is using curl to scrape the HTML and extract the content from the site. I created this a long time ago when I was creating a “local” list of businesses which I could contact to offer my services.

Starting today I am going to completely revamp the code and also fix the regular expressions so that they will actually grab content. I am going to add a front-end to the code so that you do not have to alter code and run this manually from the browser by altering the query string in the URL.

I have started on this today and will be working on it heavily over the next few days until it is completed. At this point I have finalized the fetching of categories and storing them in the database. Now because this code is just for sample code which I will probably turn into an article on this site I am not going to use any special database abstraction layer. I am going to keep it simple and just use the php mysql_* functions.

Stay tuned for more information if you are interested in a complete rewrite of the code I linked to above.

Over the last few weeks I have been applying all over for Web Developer positions here in the Boston area.  I have been telling everyone that I am a beginner with CSS / JavaScript however I think I have been selling myself short.  I decided to take the W3Schools CSS Quiz just to see how much I know off the top of my head.  I found the quiz to be easy but I never figured I would make it through 20 questions in 3 minutes 34 seconds and get them all correct. I know that the W3Schools quiz is just a simple one so that you can see how much you know and is not actually a test of skill.  While I still have quite a bit to learn I think I have been stating that I know less than I do and well that is not a good thing when it comes to trying to find a job.  I have been trying to be honest however I have been lying to myself.  I know more about CSS than I thought.  I also did a lot of reading today from a sitepoint book I have and most of the stuff I understoood.

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Over the last few days I have been digging deep into the concepts of REST. I have been reading through my copy of RESTful Web Services. Out of curiosity I searched Google for a “php REST library” and it turned up the Official MySpace PHP REST Library.

I started to look through the code and noticed something really weird about how the code is structured. It looks like they are trying to use an Object Oriented approach however I think they are going about things improperly. The code looks a lot like the following.

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I have been working remote for companies for over the last 3 years. I have a solid reputation and am able to perform better from my home office than I am from an in-house position. I am seeking ANY type of employment right now whether it be contract, part time or full time. However I am looking more for full time work.

If you have anything or know of any position please let me know. I was just notified today that my position at my current employer has been dissolved.

I have 10 years of experience with PHP, you can see my resume here.

Over the last few months the team at Politics.com has been very hard at work. We have been working on a lot of new features to make the site even more interactive for the user. I am hoping that all of these changes will make the site become more popular with the political community. If you are political in the very least and love the social side of the internet you should definitely check out the site. Politics.com is a social networking site where you can meet people and debate political issues. There are a lot of features to the site and I will not be covering them all in this post but you can think of it as a combination between YouTube, Digg and Facebook!

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This is a new layout that I have in the works. Please tell me your thoughts on the layout, what you like and what you don’t. Feedback will be greatly appreciated.

The other day Steven released another video on the TMC website. This video is all about Key Value Coding and using Bindings in your interface. I finally got the chance to watch the rest of the video this morning and I have to say that it is a great starting place if you are looking into bindings. He goes into detail about KVC and explains how it all works. I do wish however that he went into more details on the magic of Bindings and how they work behind the scenes.

There are many developers (myself included) who have not yet adopted bindings because they see them as some magical functionality. At some point I will have to read deeper about bindings and actually learn how they work so that I can use them properly in my project. I do know how to implement a table view without using bindings and I have to say… Bindings looks *much* easier to do. It was a short process for getting the data into the table view in this video tutorial. When doing all of this without bindings you need to have all the table view methods in place to return the proper data.

This is another good release from TMC so be sure to check out the KVC and Bindings video tutorial if you want to start learning about KVC or Bindings

This morning I was going to create a Facebook.com account just to see the differences as I have never used that service but have used MySpace in the past. Well I went to signup and was a bit shocked when I saw this error. I will try again later but you would think a site as large as FaceBook would not have issues like this.

The other day my friend Steven from Thoughtful Tree Software released a new version of his Inspector Framework. This new version includes both the framework and an Interface Builder Plug-in which makes it extremely easy for you to integrate this into your own projects.

After reading his blog post and watching the video that he has created it looks like a very nice addition to any application that would require an inspector style window. I might have to look at using this in my project the TomTom POI Manager. I am not yet sure what I would use this for but surely I can find a reason to use it.

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