Top 5 Skills for Online Media Engineers
I’ve been reviewing a lot of resumes for contract positions at several of the 10 ten online media companies. Its interesting to see the common set of java skill develop. So if you want to be a java developer here are the skills the market is presenting.
- Struts MVC - the MVC everyone uses, inhouse MVC are dying out replace by open source versions
- AJAX - everyone has this on their resume, but everyone means form validation without reloads (see Struts above)
- XML - its the new way to write configuration files
- JSP - This means understanding the servlet lifecycle and the ability to do gunt work by adapting the web pages for constant updates
- CSS - everyone knows the basics of CSS which is good, big change from 2 years ago
- JSTL & Tags - shows up on almost all resumes and everyone has a different level of experience
- ORM & DAO - anything goes, lots of inhouse code which people are afraid to change
- Spring - but only as an IOC container for Hibernate and the occasions bean configuration management
To me the interesting thing is the lack of variety. My favorite question so far has been:
Q: “Which XML parser did you use?”
A: “DOM & SAX”
Q: “Oh sorry let me rephrase, which implementation of an XML parser did you use?”
A: “DOM & SAX”
Its always the same! I’m not sure how exactly people are doing XML parsing with out knowing the implementation. I must be missing some super easy parsenow function in java. A quick google shows that even the Sun tutorial lists the XML parsers
What interests me the most is how shallow the tool box is. Take the MVC layer. I expected more variety like Wicket or Struts2. Spring is a good solution, but it doesn’t go far enough (especially in the view and model departments). Additional packages like Tiles and Sitemesh make a big difference.
Spring is a nice and people should use the configuration management and aspect oriented features more.
No one seems to have any knowledge of javascript libraries, which is really a shame. Pick a simple one and learn it. Its easy and lots of fun. I recommend script.aculo.us or JQuery. Exhibit is a standout facited browser written in javascript.
Lastly would be search. Search is a key skill for an online media company. Pick a searching technology and learn it. I suggest Solr, but MySQL full text search is a simple alternative. Egothor is all java and interesting, but I haven’t used it. A nice little project would be to create a simple collection and use scriptaculous to make suggestions as you type.
With all the good stuff out there why doesn’t more of it show up on resumes?