Developers unite blog

As a president of an ERP consulting services company specialized in J.D. Edwards implementation, I had the chance to meet a lot of people who were bragging to be good JDE developer. The real life prove me that most of the time, people were lying. In fact, this is a great deal to find a real professional in this area. As a former trainer for J.D. Edwards Montreal, I had the chance to teach to different people with different background and I can assure you that the most dangerous resources are the one that know how to do development in any other languages than an ERP one. J.D. Edwards developer learning curve is impressive. In order to become a good junior developer in JDE, you need at least three or four years of experiences….Otherwise…

In my e-book : “Seven steps to build a JDE PRO developer” , I explain the phases that a developer need to apply in order to have the capacity to become one of the Pros in is industry…instead of being a Charlatan. The first point, for me, is the most important. “Integrity and Honesty”. Please, say the truth. This is a new time and what if…I can propose a NEW WAY to do JDE technical consulting? Before creating my own company, I worked for a very high reputation firm in Montreal. Unfortunately, I was not involved in the hiring process but I was in charge of the development team. The bottom line was that in rush time, the so called JDE developers that were assign on my team were not good. They were able to full the HR hiring process with their level of experiences with OTHER languages and each time, they were not able to do the job. As a team leader, I was the one who was talking to the client and making specs for the team. It was so obvious to feel the lack of expertise in my new arrivals when I was explaining the work to accomplish. Absolutely everything can be done with the JDE development tools. If someone tried to propose something outside JDE, be on your guard. In fact, this is a small example of what can destroy a win-win situation between a client and his consulting services.

Having a high level of Integrity and Honesty should be the only way to do business. It will bring a win-win situation and the client will always turn to you when he will need high quality services for his need…NOT more. Here some successful point to remember about Integrity and Honesty in a B2B deal:1. Win-Win situation2. Confidence between partners3. Reliability4. Truth on the real needs…5. Respect6. Loyalty7. Credibility8. Success9. Durability

A NEW WAY to do business, the only way. Find these qualities with your staff or your consulting services and you will add tremendous value to your enterprise.

Early on in my web development career I tried to re-invent the wheel. I set up everything from scratch including my customers! I wasted about 5 months and about $20,000.00 on collecting content from them. I heard all the excuses……I will have the content to you by Monday. When Monday would roll around I would hear…my kids had soccer games all weekend and I just couldn’t get to it. I promise I will have my logo’s and word docs to you on Friday. When Friday came around and I would call, Oh…it has been such a busy week! I am so over worked right now I promise I will get it to you next week sometime!

I tried to stay faithful to get that original content and graphics from them. I did this until I was almost short on making my payroll! Then it all came to a complete stop! I decided to hire and farm out the content. Also I implemented a content management system! Genius….and the bank roll came back.

If you are in the web development game let me help you out here….Save your self some time and money…Farm out the content to a content writer for a couple of hundred bucks…It will save you about $2000 in time and expenses. Forget about the emails and the follow up calls and gas over to your clients and the disappointment I guarantee you will always get suckered when it comes to content. Customers don’t have time! When they originally are trying to save costs on web-development and “think” they can cut corners. The only thing they that they cut is your profit margin in half! ?

In my first article “So You want to be a Games Developer?” (http://ezinearticles.com/?So-You-Want-to-be-a-Games-Developer&id=70920), I discussed various games genres, including Web/Email games. This is one of the easiest ways to start developing games- you aren’t restricted to one language or platform and the costs are pretty low. In this article, I’ll look at the various technologies that you can use, and give you an idea of what its possible to do and how you get started.

Web games fall into various sub categories- email games, browser games, and multi player games. Email games are by far the simplest- technically they aren’t web games and you don’t even need a computer to moderate them, just to send and receive. Browser games can be implemented in Flash, JavaScript (dhtml), Java and even ActiveX/COM. I’d guess that most single player games are implemented in Flash but I’ll save that for a future article. To start with, though I’ll take you through what is involved in developing Multiplayer Web Games.

Before you start, go and take a look again at the Multi Player Online Games Directory- www.mpogd.com. Its an excellent resource and gives you an idea of the type of games out there ranging from small free games to the massive games like Sony’s Everquest.

The big multiplayer games aren’t web based but they do work across the Internet. They tend to have their own custom written clients, with encrypted protocols, fast 3d graphics and large teams of customer support staff. I recommend http://terranova.blogs.com/ as an excellent blog on this- you’ll find articles and quotes from luminaries such as Richard Bartle who produced the first Mud (its short for Multi User Dungeon), and Professor Edward Castranova; an expert on virtual world economics. Muds also tend to use their own clients, usually based on Telnet. Although these are not web games, I recommend you widen your experience as much as possible. Muds in particular although not the most popular genre still do exist and provide a good model for interactive games.

Breaking into computer game design and programming is as easy as becoming a fulltime commercial game programmer- i.e. its not! But there is nothing to stop you developing your own web game, and MPOGD will be happy I’m sure to list it in their directory. If its Open Source you can set it up and find other developers on Soiurceforge.net.

There are two categories of web game: real-time and turn based, and this dictates the type of technology that drives it. Real-time is more complicated- the server has to support multiple connections at the same time and care has to be taken to synchronise actions between clients. If you attack someone and they’ve already moved but your client isn’t keeping up then your game is not going to be popular.

A crossover between multiplayer web games and custom client games is possible with Macromedia’s Flash. It is likely that multiplayer action games based on Flash will become more prolific- there are quite a few around now. Sadly sourceforge has many such ideas that have not got past the planning stage. Also what does exist may not be open source as creating such games takes a lot of work. Googling for flash, multiplayer game returns a couple of million results but add open source and it drops to a few hundred thousand.

Unless you are an excellent Flash developer and can write good server code as well, I suggest you stick to turn based games. The good news is that web based is an area where open source development is prolific. A search on sourceforge.net for ‘game servers’ returned several projects that are mature or beta. Fancy developing an RPG in Java? Use Arianne. Or if C# is more your style, have a look at Ovorp. The most popular languages are C++ and Java (for the server) but C# projects have now started appearing and you’ll find C, Perl, and Python as well. But don’t limit your searches to sourceforge- there are many projects elsewhere as well. An excellent resource for finding games is dmoz.org-= the Open directory Project. Have a look at http://dmoz.org/Computers/Open_Source/Software/Games/ and http://dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Roleplaying/Massive_Multiplayer_Online/Independent_Developers/

E.g. Black nova Traders, which is located on sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/blacknova and has its own url http://www.blacknova.net/ BlackNova Traders is a web-based, multi-player space exploration game inspired by the popular BBS game of TradeWars. It is classified as a turn based mud. It is coded using PHP, SQL, and Javascript. BNT is officially at Beta but is a pretty complete game that is just not finished. In fact it may never be as long as developers keep tweaking it!

If you are going to develop a web game you need a server. Yes you could do it online but thats slow. Best to setup your own server.

A good starting point with the most popular technology is the Open Source L.A.M.P. family. That is Linux, Apache, MySql and Php. If you are replacing your windows pc with a new pc, wipe the hard disk on the old pc and install a Linux distribution and hook the two up with a crossover network cable. What was a relatively sluggish Windows PC is now a good development server running Apache, Php and Mysql. Linux Guis are pretty friendly these days but if you are unsure of administering Linux, download webmin from webmin.com and install it. It makes all the Linux administration stuff like configuring Samba (if you want to share drives), adding virtual sites to Apache etc very easy. Or easier still is the W.A.M.P route with everything installed on your Windows box. For pros and cons of this have a look here. http://ezinearticles.com/?Windows-vs-Linux–Hosting&id=21972

One word of caution. You might consider exposing your web server to the internet down your dsl connection. Nothing wrong with that though it limits you to having two or three users at once. If you have a static IP its pretty easy to map a domain to it. It can also be done with a dynamic Ip connection as well. Search for dynamic dns to find out how to make that work. Be sure in either case that you have enough firewall protection. An unprotected Windows pc will likely be taken over in under 15 minutes. I strongly recommend that you buy a firewall router or invest in a professional software firewall at the least.

In future articles I’ll discuss the nuts and bolts of game software development and start developing an open source game.

You need a website, but how can you tell the professional business web site developers from the college kid in his basement? The answer is fairly simple if you know what kinds of questions to ask. Professional web site developers are just that - professionals. They have college degrees and/or experience related to web site development. They understand small and medium size businesses for it is likely they are one too. Most importantly, they speak to you in your language, not theirs.

Purchasing a web site is a form of advertisement for your business. Would you pay for the development of a radio or television commercial if you were not sure you would get a return on your investment? Why risk your professional reputation by trying to get the cheapest site possible just so you can put the www.yourbusinessname.com on your business card? If you have seen the work of a web site developer and the pages look great, do they contain keywords, titles, and descriptions to help search engines like Google and Yahoo find them?

These are some of the basic questions a professional business web site developer should be able to answer:

1. How will you measure my ROI (Return on Investment)?

2. What information will be included in my monthly web site analytical reports? The reports should answer these questions at a minimum:

..a. What time of the day do most people visit?

..b. What search engines are they using to go to my site?

..c. How long does someone stay on my site?

..d. Which pages do they visit?

..e. Where do they go when they leave?

..f. What are the demographics of my typical online customer?

..g. Has my search engine ranking changed?

3. Will my site be monitored 24/7 with guaranteed 99.8% reliability?

..a. Are all links checked every day?

..b. Are broken links corrected?

4. What is my conversion rate (how many potential online customers have turned into actual customers)? Also,

..a. Why did they visit my business online?

..b. Were they happy with their purchasing experience?

..c. What would they change about my site?

5. How will you help me increase my business over time?

If you are having trouble finding a web site designer, visit the sites of your competitors or other local businesses. Most reputable web site developers list themselves and include a link in the small print at the bottom of the sites they have created. Call the businesses whose sites you like and ask the owners if they are satisfied with their Internet presence. Consider using a web site developer who is not local. They should be able to gather the information they need over the phone or through a web conference. Finally, ask for proposals with price quotes from more than one web site developer. The quality of the proposal will be a good indicator of the professionalism of the business.

In the past year and a half, internet companies, namely social networks, have broken ground on platforms that will directly influence and dictate the the internet of tomorrow: how it works, who uses it, what it has to offer, and how money will be made.

A host of social networks, including Facebook, Myspace, and Friendster have created open APIs (application programing interfaces), where third party developers can build programs or widgets, which can then be used by and distributed to members of their social networks. This fierce competition has led to a variety of new rich internet applications including favorites like “iLike” and “Top Friends.” What is this war leading to? How have these new advancements influenced the rest of the internet thus far? How will third party developers influence the future of the internet and the personal computing experience?

Historically speaking, developer platform warfare is nothing new. Even before the advent of the internet, Microsoft and Apple battled each other for years in the late 70s, each company tenaciously attempting to develop a platform to attract application developers. These early platforms evolved into modern day operating systems, such as Windows and Mac OS. The goal was simple: develop an open platform that would attract as many outside developers (application creators) as possible. The strategy was even simpler - the more developers that would sign on and build applications for the operating system, the higher the value of the operating system. The new applications would cater to businesses and consumers worldwide: law firms, government agencies, financial companies, small businesses, and all types of people around the world. In the end, Bill Gates and Paul Allen (pictured right) convinced developers that their OS was the best - the rest is history. Thousands of developers created applications - word processing programs, spreadsheet programs, etc. Microsoft won the battle, and nearly 30 years later, the company’s market value is a cool 257 billion dollars. You get the picture. Are social network companies waging a similar war?

You bet - the internet has only increased the size of the playing field. Instead of development only being practiced by a group of super nerds with unique technical know-how (sorry Bill Gates and Paul Allen), the barrier to entry in the social network developer space is extremely small and virtually insignificant. Although the competition is fierce, a large variety of application design programs exist to assist the not-so-super-coder developer build applications with relative ease, as opposed to the early days of Microsoft when much of the material was created from scratch or constructed using proprietary tools. These modern developer tools can be found in a popular program like Adobe’s Flex 3. The implication - an abundant influx of viral applications have hit the market in a relatively short amount of time. With many of these applications offering similar services, how will this market pan out? Aren’t many applications supposed to be a good thing?

David Gal, professor of management at Northwester University, recently elaborated on this issue in a VentureBeat article. Gal suggested that the best applications won’t necessarily rise to the top, and that so much competition in a an internet-style environment can actually be a negative thing:

Darwinian selection does not work so well in a networked world. Multiple competing applications may coexist in a category, leading to diminished overall adoption of the category. Moreover, those applications that come to dominate a category will not necessarily be the best or the best-maintained; rather, they will likely be the first to attract a large number of users in a particular category.

Gal is implying that many awesome third party applications may attract a tremendous amount of users, at least initially. The problem lies in the fact that there may not only exist one or two attractive applications of a similar category, but tens, hundreds, or even thousands. With so much variety, the reliability of the ‘darwinian selection’ process may fall victim to the numbers. With so many millions of social network users selecting one or any combination of many different applications within one category, the category (for example, music applications) will get viciously drawn out and chopped up, with no clear cut application ever rising to the top and taking the cake. Where does this leave the future of the internet?

A couple conclusions, or predictions, can now be drawn or formulated in relation to the developer application war, brought on in recent times by the social networks.

First, and foremost, the future of the internet, in terms of available rich programs and content, will be dictated by third party user-generated customizable applications, not necessarily by already established software giants (like a Microsoft). These larger established companies, including the social network companies, will most likely merely provide the means for these developers to work with. Developers will follow this model until a single company wins the platform war outright, where at that point, all developers will migrate to this popular platform. History will repeat itself, in relation to the early days of Microsoft and its first operating system. The key will be, once again, to attract these rich internet application developers scattered around the world.

Second, increased competition resulting from an almost non-existent barrier to entry may dilute the entire space, influencing the destruction or impairment of an application’s ability to blow up and dominate in its specific category. An application’s ability to attract many users initially wouldn’t mean that it would be guaranteed future success and predictability. This may already be apparent in current social networking platforms.

Third, the winner of the platform war will undoubtedly characterize and define the internet in the coming years. As I have alluded to in my other posts, I believe this platform will be an entirely web based system that is not reliant on local desktops. The platform will be free of charge to consumers (goodbye to the $100 OS), and offer every type of program imaginable, anything from simple notepad applications to advanced money management tools. Questions to be answered - how do you monetize the system, and how will developers get paid, especially if the platform is free? Most likely, either developers will charge small fees for their applications (no more $150 software, competition will be too fierce) or the mother company (winner of the platform war), will channel some of its advertising revenue to these developers for compensation.

Finally, the winner of the platform war will be an innovative company that can strategically forward its current user base onto its new platform. Social networks may be the perfect candidates for this because of their gigantic and reoccurring user bases. Is this to say that a Facebook (pictured above) will become the next generation Microsoft? It’s possible. Transferring and attracting users may be the largest hurdle that a platform candidate must overcome in order to defeat its competition.

The stakes are big and the space is wide open for the taking - the race has started and competition will only become more intense. The company that develops, not necessarily the best platform, but the platform that attracts the most amount of developers and achieves critical mass will be worth billions almost overnight.

There are millions of website designers out there, hundreds of thousands of companies, and thousands of cowboys. Choosing one to build your site can be very, very difficult, and people get ripped off every day - but here are some tips to help you find a reputable designer.

1. Make sure they don’t use templates.

Pre-built website templates aren’t for designers; they’re for people without any technical knowledge or design skills who want to knock up a website in an hour or so. There is no shame in using pre-made templates for personal sites, but a designer should never have to use them - and for a business site to be based on a template is very unprofessional. There could be a hundred other sites out there that look exactly the same as yours - not terribly handy for a business that wants to distinguish itself from the competition. If the company you’re checking out uses templates, you may as well build the site yourself.

2. Make sure they don’t lock you into their hosting.

I went to see some folks in Chester today who’d been ripped off by their designers - they built an E-commerce website from a template, made the customer insert his own products, and charged him ?450 for the privilege. Even more obscenely, they then expected him to pay three hundred pounds a year for hosting.

Sadly, this sort of scam is all too prevalent. Get the company’s hosting rates in writing - or, better yet, host the site yourself. If they offer to host it for free for the first year, that’s fine - it’s an accepted industry standard. But make sure that you’re free to move your site to another host, and that your domain name is registered to yourself in case of disputes.

You can find out who a domain name is registered to by running a WHOIS check. Test a few of the sites in the designer’s portfolio, to make sure they’re not registering their clients’ domains under their own name.

3. Always look for testimonials that can be backed up with contact details or web addresses, a portfolio site hosted on a proper domain name (anything that sounds spammy like super-cheapwebsites-4u-2day.me.uk should be avoided) and a good command of written English. If they confuse “your” with “you’re,” or “it’s” with “its,” or “there” with “they’re” or “there,” they will make your company look horribly unprofessional and untrustworthy.

4. Use the W3C validation service to test their portfolio website for code errors. If they can’t make code that passes validation for their own website, how well do you think they’ll write yours?

5. Test their portfolio site, and sites they’ve made for clients, in at least both FireFox and Internet Explorer, to make sure that they display correctly. They don’t have to look exactly the same - they probably won’t, thanks to Internet Explorer’s blatant disregard for Web standards - but make sure that you can at least move around the site and make sense of it, and that it looks half-decent.

6. If the designer uses a Hotmail address, run. If they won’t give you a contact telephone number, run. Mobile numbers are acceptable and normal, due to the transitory nature of website designers, and shouldn’t carry the stigma that they’d be associated with in other industries. Check to see if they’re tax-registered, and that they’ll be able to furnish you with an invoice and receipt, on letter headed paper.

7. Meet up with your designer in person if you can. Obviously this is hard if they’re overseas, but if you live nearby, ask if they charge a consultation fee.

8. Determine whether or not the designer will charge you for updates to your website, whether or not you’ll be able to easily update your site yourself, and whether or not they’ll still be around in a year’s time to help you out with it. Contact the customers listed in their Testimonials section, if needs be.

9. As a just-in-case, Google their business name (in quotation marks) just to see if there’s any negative feedback left in forums. Don’t ever buy website design services from eBay. Ever. Seriously.

10. Although this may run counter to a few of the things I’ve already said, be very wary of large companies offering website design services. The smaller companies, sole traders and partnerships, always do a better job for much less money.

I hope these tips help to steer you away from disreputable designers, but remember to use your common sense, shop around, and keep your wits about you.

Good luck!

There are two sides to real estate development feasibility study: The Cost Side & The Income Side.

I am going to concentrate in this article on The Cost Side.

Having told you that a feasibility study is vital when applying for finance, it is however, just another cog in the wheel of the property development process.

To help you come to grips with the term, feasibility study, it might help you if I call it a, Financial Analysis, of all the costs and income revenue that tell you if your development will produce a profit.

Where To Start?

When you are at the very beginning of preparing a feasibility study - I mean when you are just thinking about buying the land on which you propose to develop a building, your initial cost figures are liable to be a bit ‘rubbery.’

They’re general - they are not exact and can’t be exact, because all you know at the beginning is the ‘asking price of the land.’

Hopefully the land cost will be less than the asking price after you complete the buying negotiation. Can you see that there is going to be a difference in just that first item of the feasibility study - land cost?

OK - if you accept that, you’ll also accept that the associated land costs will also vary. Items like conveyance costs, legal charges, stamp duty, adjustment of utility charges and other costs.

That should demonstrate to you that a feasibility study goes through several stages.

The first stage uses figures that are the ‘best’ figures you have available at the time. The last stage is when all your cost figures are firm and final.

But as you are only at the stage of deciding to buy the land or not, you figures are “general and loaded with safety” - in dollar terms.

Let’s be clear about what I mean here. For the land cost you would use the full asking price and all the associated costs, at full calculation for your initial entry in the feasibility study. Then if you negotiated a lower price you are safe.

If you first feasibility study shows a satisfactory profit return for the risk of doing the development, you will proceed and gain legal control of the land.

Well, to gain control, you must have concluded a negotiation on the land sale price - so you have now “firmed up” on one of the cost items. Hopefully it is lower than, or the same as the figure you allowed in the feasibility study.

In the first feasibility study you will allowed a figure for the fees of the design consultants.

People like the architect, the engineer and so on. Well now you have to engage them to create the initial design for you and again this is a negotiation that will either be within your feasibility study allowance or not.

The next major item in your feasibility study will be the constructions cost.

If your development comprises ten town homes, that are aimed at the luxury end of the owner occupier market, your market knowledge may tell you that you should allow $180,000 per to town home or $1.8 million to build all ten.

Your design team will have to design well within those cost parameters and after the initial design is complete in preliminary format, you will need to get a few master builders to give you a price.

If you are well within the $1.8 million, then you may decide to leave the $1.8 million figure in your feasibility study. This would be smart if the buider’s figure was say, $1.7 million.

The extra $100,000 acts as a safety buffer as you are only pricing off non-detailed preliminary design plans.

Now. let’s say it’s your intention to sell all these town homes at a profit, so you have allowed some marketing costs to cover sales commissions, brochure printing etc. in your feasibility study.

At this stage the biggest figure is the sales commission and so you have been out talking to agents and so you have a good idea that your figures are OK.

At this stage we have wrapped up all of the “major” costs except the finance costs or interest on you borrowed development finance.

By now, hopefully you will have bought my e-book, and know how to go about seeking development finance the correct way and not the dumb way.

So you will not only know the best interest rate, but more importantly, have the correct type of loan and on the correct “terms” - you know the small print stuff.

At this stage everyone I teach wants to buy a software program so that they can get all the calculations done “easy like.”

Well I have a problem with that - I know, and believe, that for you to get to know your development intimately, you have to go to the trouble of doing the feasibility study figures manually - it is only adding, subtracting and multiplying some figures.

It is not difficult and the benefit is that you get to “know” the importance and interplay of each figure on the end result, being profitability.

So a simple spread sheet broken up into months on an XL is all you need.

In month one you buy the land for $286,500 and associated costs of say, $21,700 so you enter a figure of $310 ($308,200 rounded up to $310,000 - you have added a bit of safety in this one item)

Note: never use the full figure allways round up and take off the last three zeros - so $310,000 becomes $310l; $3,500 becomed $3.5 and $800 becomes $8. This makes it easier to read and creates less mistakes.

You then spread the design costs across the page to reflect the negotiated deal you did with the designers.

Then the construction costs - marketing costs and so on. You can divide these individual costs up into a many smaller items as you wish.

But the real thing you are doing is setting out your best estimate of the flow of cash that is required from the Lender and also from your own equity funds - the Cost Cash Flow.

Once you have these figures spread across the page you add then vertically for a total monthly figure - and also horizontally for each item total.

Hopefully the big development cost total in the bottom right hand box is equal to the vertical and horizontal totals.

It is - great; go to the top of the class.

Earlier I mentioned that you will have concluded the terms of your development loan.

Well, let’s say that the Lender has agreed to lend you 80% of your costs. This means you have to provide 20% from your own capital resources.

Having got the monthly totals you can now calculate 80% of each figure, because this is the amount on which you will pay interest.

It is these figures that you now calculate interest on each monthly cash flow and arrive at a total cost of the finance for your development.

You now add the total interest figure to the Cost Total and arrive at what we call the Total Capital Cost of your development.

There are a total of about 44 item headings that make up the Cost Side of a Feasibility Study.

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains has I’d say end user integration tool - Great Plains Integration manager. Integration Manager itself uses OLE functionality to validate text or ODBC integration files data through Great Plains forms behind the scenes. This sounds very promising and powerful - however the realities place the restrictions. We heard a lot of complains about Integration Manager slowness and inability to integrate data to multiple companies automatically - without operator intervention. This is probably true if you do not have IM expertise in your company. However there are Microsoft Great Plains maestros who could make magic things happen

? Great Plains Macros. Continuum could deploy Great Plains Dynamics macros, recorded to switch companies. This fact is almost unknown and the reason is - you can not have these macros to be replayed in the Great Plains itself

? Integration Manager Before Integration Script. This script is often used by third party software vendors to run their data manipulation routines. The challenge for integration automation is to automate modal dialog login screens, originated from third party applications

? Customization Site License. In order to enable custom integration you need to have this license - which costs $750 for Great Plains Standard. Please be sure that you do not have to have Modifier with VBA if you outsource the development.

? Drawbacks - unfortunately nowadays practice of service packs has the drawback if you plan to deploy Continuum- each service pack has a tendency to modify fields names in the code and this is where Continuum gives up - because it uses object calls

? Outdated Technology? Well - maybe. But you have to have work done. Continuum does the job

? SQL Cursor approach. The other way would be using SQL cursors with either eConnect or MS SQL Stored procedures calls. This will certainly allow you to switch companies, but this requires programming.

Good luck with implementation, customization and integration and if you have issues or concerns - we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

The general job market in the United Kingdom has grown greatly over the last five years. This growth has its origins in a number of different economic factors leading to the UK’s ascension as a major player in the globalized economy. Corporations looking for talented professionals for jobs in every industry are looking to homegrown university graduates, who are put through rigorous curricula. As well, international companies from Europe, North America, and Asia have set up storefronts and offices in the UK. This has increased the number of jobs open to new graduates.

The average observer trying to pinpoint one industry that has exploded over the last five years may look at web development. After all, before the turn of the 21st century, sophisticated and well-crafted websites were the purview of only the largest companies. However, the expansion of the Internet and affordable computing equipment has meant the need by every business to develop a virtual storefront on the Internet. Web development is a booming field of graduates in the UK, if they have the right skills.

Companies throughout the United Kingdom are looking for web developers who are committed to long term success in their field. Web developers who are interested in advancing within the industry, learning as much as possible and putting in long hours to get the job done can be rewarded with the most lucrative jobs in the UK.

Much like the websites worked on by web professionals, the development field is dynamic. Corporations and small companies in search of web developers often look for web developers who have skills and experience compatibles with their end product. A graduate with knowledge of website design who has worked part time in a clothing store may be a perfect match for a major shoe retailer in the UK. Dynamic web professionals not only know the nuts and bolts of web development but how their work influences perceptions of a company’s product.

Finally, the UK jobs market is largely dictated by the willingness of developers to be flexible in the workplace. Corporations often seek out project or short term web developers to help them get their website off the ground. Web development firms look for graduates who are committed to working on a number of projects. In all, the job market for web developers requires ability by an individual applicant to go with the flow and remain committed to excellence no matter the environment they work in.

Dear readers, as you may recall, yesterday’s posting reported the abrupt end to a telephone interview with Oscar Rivero, the Miami developer revealed by the Miami Herald in a front-page story that morning to have taken millions of dollars of public money to build, among other things, a 11,000-square-foot mansion for his wife and himself instead of housing for the poor.

Well, it seems Mr. Rivero was giving the interview on his cell phone (model not known) while driving his black Mercedes C240 to turn himself in at the “Miami-Dade Public Corruption Investigations Bureau” (I’m not making this up) where the phoner was terminated. Described in the account as “a 36-year-old lawyer and civic leader” you have to wonder, what was he thinking when he decided to give himself up in the black Mercedes? Didn’t he have a Honda Civic parked behind the mansion for just these kind of situations? Maybe he could have borrowed a bike from one of the homeless guys he’s building the country club for. Maybe he had a lot on his mind. In any event he was later charged with two first-degree felonies: grand theft and committing an organized scheme to defraud. If convicted, he could serve a minimum of 21-months in state prison which is probably what he’ll get since he’s a “civic leader.” By that time, with a little creative financing that will allow him to pay back the money he took from the county without totally relinquishing his assets, his “Country Club for the Homeless” should be ready for him to move in. Who says “Crime doesn’t pay?”