linkedin.com needs to sync up company names when the company name changes

My invites to present and former colleagues via linkedin.com have started to tumble in as opposed to the normal trickle.  I think that's a fairly accurate sign of our flagging economy as anything I can personally put a number on.  Of course it could also be that I'm a loser who has never really used linkedin a lot and so have practically no contacts there.  ;-)

What's annoying however is the way linkedin keeps track of company names and what happens when a company name changes.  For instance, let's say I work at a company called "Davisons."  I put that in my linkedin profile.  "Davisons" gets bought by "Johnson, Inc" and they change the name of the company to "Johnson Davisons."  So any new people coming into the company know it as "Johnson Davisons," not just "Davisons."  When they look for current employees on linkedin, they won't find all of them because some have the old company named listed while some will have the new company name listed.  Not to mention how bad this problem gets when one of your previous employers changes names after you have left.

This problem is what I would call an issue with name history.  This kind of name history problem is starting to creep into other areas of the web as well.  I've already had the misfortune of trying to email someone I haven't emailed in a few years and reached a completely different person (ie, one person's email acct was shut down and another started with the same address).  Pretty embarassing -- makes me think twice about starting emails with "Hey dirtbag!  Long time no see!"

The solution for linkedin's name history problem is pretty simple.  They should ask you if the company has gone by any other names and let you choose from possible alternates (or even free type them).  It won't take long for their system to build up the necessary relationships between past and current company names.  It could even be pretty slick and auto-update old companies in your profile to their present name if the name is now different from what you specified.

A search for employees of "Davisons" in this case would give you both Davisons and Johnson Davisons and whatever other company names are "linked in" to this company.

Firefox 3 is my panacea

So one of my biggest technological hurdles has been overcome, I can finally switch folders in gmail since I upgraded to Firefox 3.  Sounds small, I know, but I was one of the few afflicted by this weird bug on both my work and home machine.  And I got to use the word "panacea" in a grammatically correct title.  Ahh, life is good.

Obama and McCain website technology

Hey all, I just realized that johnmccain.com is running MS Windows and .NET while barackobama.com is running LAMP with PHP. May the best tech, errr, candidate win.

Also, Obama needs a PHP contractor in Boston, Ma.

Beware the Lone Wolf PHP Developer

With all the posts on interviewing PHP candidates popping up lately, I thought I'd post this draft that I've been sitting on for awhile that's related to new jobs and interviewing candidates.

I've run into the Lone Wolf PHP Developer at several places I have done work. Sometimes, I've had to work side-by-side with the Lone Wolf. Other times, I've replaced the Lone Wolf who had moved on to different hunting grounds. Still other times I've had to hire people and had to choose between a Lone Wolf and several other candidates.

Just who is this Lone Wolf and why should we fear them so much? Here are some telltale signs of the Lone Wolf PHP Developer:

1. The Lone Wolf doesn't understand how to work in a team of developers. They typically don't even understand what benefits that would create. They do all development on their own, listening to very little input from qualified sources.
2. The Lone Wolf got to page 141 on Enter-A-Beginner-PHP-Book-Title-Here and no further. Objects? They've never heard of them. They must not need them.
3. The Lone Wolf re-invents the wheel for every project and doesn't use standard tools and practices.
4. The Lone Wolf eats their young. OK, I made that one up. Frankly, how could a Lone Wolf have young anyway?
5. The Lone Wolf is perfectly satisfied with doing programming work on production servers and using FTP to deploy their code. It never occurs to them that they should strive to create development and test environments. It never occurs to them that deployment via FTP doesn't scale higher then one developer.
6. The Lone Wolf doesn't know what the letters SCM, CVS, or SVN are, or how to use them in their daily work.
7. The Lone Wolf never reads my blog or any other blogs on programming. The Lone Wolf may not know what a blog is.
8. The Lone Wolf says crazy things like "MySQL can't do transactions" and somehow gets management to believe them.
9. The Lone Wolf was initially adored by management because they launched a lot of code live during their short stay. Too bad all that code is buggy and completely un-maintainable moving forward. Management doesn't like that.
10. The Lone Wolf whips up incredibly stupid and unnecessarily complex solutions like template systems in which the templates are stored in a database instead of the file system/memory/cache. They shun using tried and true templating methods like PHP files, XSLT, or at the very least, Smarty. (see also: reinventing the wheel)
11. The Lone Wolf names variables after themselves that mean nothing to anyone else (ex, $lonewolfFlag )
12. And worst of all… The Lone Wolf PHP Developer fails to realize that there are other developers out there in the business world, trying to earn a living just like they are. By failing to conform to development standards that have been proven and tested, they make everyone's job more difficult.

Now, I personally have run into this Lone Wolf scenario with other programming languages as well. But I think because it is so simple to work with PHP without much formal training that it lends itself to this problem much more readily then other languages. The blessing and curse of PHP is that it is the new VB 6.