Last week I posted on Twitter, “In the past few weeks I’ve heard of 10+ Lotus Developer jobs. If you’re out of work I will train you.” I immediately got a bunch of responses so I thought I’d elaborate here and answer some of the more common questions I’ve gotten.
What’s the deal?
The details may change but as the title of this post infers I plan on taking on at least one apprentice who I will instruct on building Lotus Notes/Domino applications. I will make myself available to meet weekly for an hour for instruction and on a regular basis via phone and email for questions and guidance. When appropriate the apprentice will be able to shadow my activities as they relate to application development and the business of application development. My hope is that in a matter of months the person will have enough skills to get some work.
What skills does a budding apprentice need?
Some programming experience is preferred but not necessary since if you know how to program you shouldn’t have any trouble finding work. You should have a geeky heart and be a power user on a computer. Meaning, you’ve created a few scripts or macros and you’re not afraid to get into some real trouble messing with your computer.
What is a Lotus Developer
The basic explanation is someone who creates applications using the Lotus Designer Client. The new Eclipsed based client is available for free. Both Eclipse and the Lotus Designer Client are IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). They help facilitate coding by putting useful information at your finger tips and with features like type ahead, error checking and debugging.
Wikipedia has a pretty good description of Lotus Notes and it’s history. For more in depth information check out the developerworks web site. For the current buzz follow Ed Brill’s Blog or the many blogs and resources linked from there.
What’s the demand for Lotus Developers?
Since I began working as a developer in 1995 I’ve never been able to stay unemployed. If tomorrow I didn’t have my own company the problem wouldn’t be finding work it would be finding the best outfit to work for. On the flip side when I’ve been in a position to hire a Notes Developer it’s been slim pickings. Although the numbers are constantly in dispute Lotus Notes/Domino holds about 40% of the market share world wide compared to 48% percent for Microsoft Exchange. I think it’s fair to say that the Lotus platform is more popular outside the Unites States but whatever the market share there’s still a huge user base and a great opportunity for application developers. These days most young developers are gravitating towards sexier platforms like Ruby on Rails. The Lotus crowd tends to be older and old school geeky (not in a hip Wired magazine sort of way). All this translates into opportunity.
Next Steps
If you’re interested go to the links in the post and read on. If you’re still interested email me at daniel@snakehill.net. If you’re a Lotus Developer and you’re reading this consider doing something similar. Imagine if Lotus professionals around the globe started taking on apprentices what a difference it would make.
Twleve years ago I presented a list to a group of local politicians and businessmen laying out some ways the arts could be used in Southeast Baltimore revitalization efforts. Over the years a few of these ideas have come to fruition. Most notable the development of the Patterson Movie Theater as a gallery/theater/studio complex for the Creative Alliance. Years later a whole lot more is starting to happen. In the past few weeks Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts has installed sculpture in Patterson Park, and a young engineer Kevin Bernhard has organized an installation of pimped out trash cans throughout Highlandtown. Add to this an event like Salsapolkalooza this summer and you’ll find an arts district that’s flourishing. Multiple efforts over the years have been fanning the artistic embers in our community for years. But in the past few years new leadership at SECDC and new faces in the community have added fuel to the fire. Hopefully, the word will get out and we’ll see more efforts crop up all around Highlandtown.
On September 19th there’s a reception planned for the sculpture in Patterson Park East from 6 – 8 PM. The next day three venues will have artist receptions throughout Highlandtown.
ReNEWable ARTifacts – Sculptures by Ed Gross 4 – 6 PM
Magnolia Designs
246 S. Conkling Street
www.magnoliadesignsllc.com
Rande Barke: Encrypted Landscapes 4 – 6 PM
Schiavone Fine Art
244 S Highland Avenue
www.schiavonefineart.com
Lindsay Petrick: New Work 6 – 8 PM
Laughing Pint
3531 Gough Street
www.laughingpint.com
Kudos to my friends at Catalist for their mention in Wired Magazine. The article talked about how some new technologies rely on terabytes of data. The brief mention while certainly adding to their geek cred made their day to day data scrubbing and analysis seem more sexy than reality. Catalist warehouses and analyzes voter data for progressive candidates. They can fill some holes and make some great educated guesses like whether you’re likely to be a gun owner or how you’re likely to vote in November. A few weeks back the New York Times did a profile of them highlighting the changes that have come from campaign finance reform. The Times article was a bit conspiratorial in tone. But there’s really not much to it. Organizations like Catalist have cropped up to navigate campaign spending rules, but they are also a naturally evolution in efficiency. Services like this are becoming more available as businesses develop to make sense out of the huge amounts of data available. For an example take a look at Silobreaker.
Highlandtown is a happening place this time of year. The Highlandtown Wine Festival is on April 20th and this Saturday, April 12 is the first Highlandtown Spring Studio tour. From year’s of putting on events and doing community organizing I’ve come up with a few simple rules.
- Build from existing strengths
- The simpler the better
- Don’t like the reality, create your own
Both these events are prime examples of these rules in action. The wine festival came from observing the flurry of activity every October when Italian men in the neighborhood make wine. As we progress into the sixth year of this event, it has rekindled interest in the community, attracted outside investment, and strengthened connections with people who grew up here but now live in the suburbs. When we started the idea of a wine festival in Highlandtown was considered bizarre. Now we have an ad campaign promoting housing titled “Highlandtown Wine Country”.
The Highlandtown Arts (ha!) effort started a year ago and within that time we’re seeing an increase in cultural activities and greater investment in the arts. Our most successful event is the ha!ppy hour we hold at the Laughing Pint every first Wednesday. Our ha!ppy hour gets all the local artists together, they talk, drum up ideas, and make things happen. So simple and so little effort I feel a twinge of guilt.
Background
Recently a reporter from the Baltimore Sun has been making the rounds in Highlandtown talking to people in the neighborhood about changes in the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood. I talked to him last week and it started my thinking about the wealth of topics that could be addressed. He only has 1400 words and I have no idea of what he’ll be focusing on. So I’ll preempt with a few thoughts of my own.
Highlandtown is an unusually diverse neighborhood. At first the community was predominantly German. Polish and Ukranians came into the mix, and then a wave of Italians showed up. My parish Our Lady of Pompei was founded to service the growing Italian population around 1926. By the time I moved to Highlandtown in 1996 part of the Italian community had either grown older or migrated to points further East like Rosedale and Belair. If you’ve lived in Baltimore for any length of time you’d be familiar with this migration pattern. But we still have more Italians living here than in Baltimore’s Little Italy.
At one point Baltimore City was losing about 10,000 residents a year. By the 80’s the city was in pretty rough shape. Though Baltimore’s been pulling out of this tread some statistics still look bleak. Of the approximate 630,000 residents only a third of them work. The rest I assume are retired, too young, or caught in all too familiar patterns of dysfunction. About 1/4 of the properties in Baltimore City are owned by non-profits. You can imagine the challenges this has created for the local government. As of the 2000 census the average annual household income in Highlandtown is $26,000. When I moved to Baltimore in 1988 there were few young people. You rarely saw a baby carriage and never saw anyone jogging.
Though Highlandtown had ridden out the 1970’s and 1980’s better than waterfront areas like Fells Point and Federal Hill, in the 90’s the older generation was slowly dying off and housing was plentiful and cheap. The housing boom of the last decade presented some opportunities to fill neighborhood vacancies. There’s been some efforts by the two CDCs in the area, SouthEast CDC and Patterson Park CDC but also some home grown solutions. Many Italians in the neighborhood are in the contracting business. As these businesses starting hiring Latinos in the late 1990’s, they rented and sold houses to Latinos. The two cultures are compatible. Both are Catholic, have a strong family centered culture, and work in the trades. Even the language barriers are less. An Italian speaker has no problem switching to Spanish. In a related effort our pastor at Pompei, Father Lou Esposito, recognized these trends and brought in Italian Missionaries to work with the growing Latino community. These activities have worked well to fill up houses and pews.
That’s the recent demographic history of my microcosm. There are some broader trends that are also of interest to this discussion. The fact that the United States as a whole has an aging population and that Latin America has a young population. The sharp decline in the working population in the United States and elsewhere that will take place over the next twenty years. But from the ground level questions arise. What changes are in store in the near future? Will tensions increase in the neighborhood as Latinos become more dominant? How do these trends feed into the national discussion about race inspired by Barack Obama’s recent speech? That’s what I’d like to explore in this series.
I’ve been meaning to blog in some capacity ever since my son was born in May 2005. I thought it would be great to leave him my thoughts permanently embedded in the ether. Unfortunately those first few years of fatherhood left me too exhausted and daddy-brained to write anything intelligent. During art school and for years afterwards I was an avid journal writer. Of course the audience for a journal usually adds up to one. But that practice prepped me for a brief stint writing art criticism for a few different magazines including The Urbanite and The New Art Examiner. As I finally loaded up WordPress to take it for a trial spin the possibility of writing arose once again with the added benefit of an unlimited audience.
But what to write about? My interests are all over the place so the idea of writing on just one subject just isn’t practical. And so I’ve decided to write about my three main interests, art, technology and community. Art because even when programming I think of myself as a painter. Technology because it has it’s own culture. And community because my involvement in neighborhood revitalization here in Highlandtown and because the idea of community permeates the world of art and the world of geekdom.
So that’s the mission. To explore these three communities, and hopefully share some useful information and participate in some dialog.
