One of the things I love about being a trainer is that I get to visit and work with so many development teams. Every group of developers has their own chemistry, culture, skills and domain interests. Sometimes I think I’m learning as much as the teams I’m training.
As it happens, one of the teams I’ve enjoyed working with the most is looking for a full-time RCP/OSGi project lead. The company, EXTOL, is a small, successful ISV that creates B2B integration tools. I don’t do this too often, but I wanted to pass this on because I think it’s such a cool opportunity. What’s so cool about it, you ask?
- First, I don’t think there’s any better programming job than working for a small ISV. You can have a big impact and what you do matters. A lot.
- EXTOL is re-architecting it’s products from the ground up (this is greenfield development) and they’re using a lot of interesting technologies – RCP, OSGi, EMF, GMF and more.
- One of the coolest things they’re doing is leveraging OSGi on both the client-side and server-side. Very few projects are leveraging OSGi in this way, and I think the opportunities here are awesome.
- Finally, the team is great. The developers are smart and easy to work with, management knows how to let developers be successful.
So what’s the catch? Well, whether there’s a catch or not depends on what you’re looking for in your life at the moment. EXTOL is located in a small town (Pottsville) in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania. It’s a beautiful area with lots to do outdoors, a great place to raise a family and much more. It’s not for everyone, but I imagine it would be great for more than a few of the developers I’ve met.
If you’re interested, here’s a post on the EXTOL blog that goes into more detail. They’ll also have developers at EclipseCon, so feel free to introduce yourself to one of them (or me) if you’re there as well.
Hi Patrick,
I encountered your blog after subscribing for the Planet OSGi feed aggregator. Having found the “Why OSGi is Important?” post to be the clearest answer to the question I’ve seen, I caught up with the rest of your posts available through Planet OSGi, one of them being this post.
The phrase “management knows how to LET developers be successful” (emphasis mine) caught my eye. I’ve spent some years working in companies where projects would fail despite their software developers’ best efforts. This seemed mainly due to project stakeholders and management changing core requirements three quarters into development, telling developers how to do their jobs (down to imposing specific technical solutions), cancelling the projects, or letting key developers go around the time completion would actually seem in sight.
If you ever find some time to write a blog post that deviates from your main topic of modular technologies I think it’d be interesting to read about your encounters with software project managers who know how to let developers succeed, and how they’re doing it. Every aspiring development team manager would find such information useful.
Regards,
Boris
Thanks for the kind words Boris, and I’ll consider writing a post like that. One of the benefits of my job is that I get to work with a lot of software development teams and I get to see the good, bad, and ugly :-)
One thing I find as a general rule, though, is that when a company is selling software the process is usually much more rational and healthy. If I was looking for a job, I’d make sure that the software I was writing was viewed as a profit engine and not an overhead cost.
Regards,
— Patrick
Hi all
I am facing one problem in one RCP application. My application is a server dependent application. Its a simple J2EE application which will run in Application Server, but as pre the requirement I need to add server control in my RCP application also, like user can start the server , stop the server or can change the server password all those things. Some thing like we generally we do in Server View of Eclipse IDE (I mean to say when we add the application server in IDE), only difference will be in eclipse IDE we can add the Server in server view as per our requirement and multiple times , but in this case there will be only one server and one ear file deployed in it. Is that possible in any way to extend that “Server View” in own RCP application , so that the user user can have some portion of server Admin control in RCP application or is there any other way to add Server Admin panel in own RCP application. Please help me out . Thanks a lot in advance.
Hi Sujit,
I’ve never done this myself and I’m not sure what kind of framework exists for integrating servers. If I were you I would get the source for a project that manages servers (e.g. Eclipse Virgo) and see how they’re doing it. And let me know how it goes :-)
— Patrick