Chris Holmes Online

It’s that time again: time to move on. I’m officially looking for a new job.

To get an idea of what I have done and what I can do, check out my resume or my CV on Careers.StackOverflow.com. Also, browse this blog

Why am I looking for work?

For the past five years I have had the privilege of working for Randy Buttenhoff at Nez Perce County. It’s been one of the best jobs I’ve ever had, and the best job I’ve had as a software developer. I work for a great boss who gives me all the tools I need to be successful. At various points in time our team has passed most of The Joel Test. I’ve been able to work with great coworkers who are really good human beings. I’ve also been given the ability to continue to grow as a software developer: to attend conferences, read blogs, experiment with new technologies and tools and keep up with the rapidly changing pace of this profession. I have enjoyed growing as a software developer.

But life has a way of throwing surprising events at us. Sometimes those events are laced with sorrow; sometimes they are good; and sometimes, if we’re lucky, they’re wonderful. Recently, I became engaged to the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. She has plans for her immediate future and I support those plans, and so that means I will be moving to her. Hey, I’m a software developer, or as I like to say, a professional problem solver – I can write software anywhere in the world. It’s a scary thing to pick up your life and move across the country, but for the right reasons, and the right people, it can be worth it. It can even be easy.

I am specifically looking for work in or near the Kingsport, Tennessee area. I will be moving to Gate City, Virginia, just across the border from Kingsport, and Kingsport seems like the most likely place to find my kind of work. I am, however, also very open to the idea of working remotely or in a consultation capacity, which is something I’ve done in the past.

What kind of work am I looking for?

My preference is work with the .NET platform (C# variety). It is where I have spent the most time in the last decade and where I am comfortable. I really like a lot of the tools and technologies and feel like I can solve problems pretty quick with my currently favored technology stack (C#.NET, SQL Server, NHibernate, FluentNhibernate, NUnit, StructureMap, etc.). That is not to say that I am opposed to new tools or technologies – far from it. If an employer thought I would be a good fit for a position as a Ruby on Rails developer, by all means, talk to me.

Most of my current work takes place in WinForms development, but I also enjoy ASP.NET development and have done some very basic WPF work as well. I especially like what I am seeing out of the ASP.NET MVC camp and the FubuMVC stuff from Jeremy Miller, Chad Meyers, et. al.

I would like to work somewhere where I have the same freedoms that I have now to continue to learn and grow as a software developer. The landscape of computer programming changes so rapidly; we owe it to our profession and our customers to stay up-to-date, continue to learn new technologies and tools and grow as problem solvers. I would like to work somewhere much like where I work now: where I am given the tools and hardware to be successful and given the time and support to continue to grow. It would be especially nice to work somewhere where there was a budget for developers to attend conference such as Agile Austin and the PDC. I attended the first Agile Open Spaces conference in Austin a few years ago and met many of the people in the C#.NET world that I admire. I also learned a lot and grew quite a bit from that conference.

At any rate, I’m on the market and openly looking for a new job. I would like to have a new job lined up by August at the latest. My current employer supports my decision and knows the reason for my move, so references from him are available on request. If you know of anyone near Kingsport, TN who needs a talented .NET developer, send them my way, eh?

-Chris

I thought this was really cool, especially considering I want to dig more deeply into the ASP.NET MVC world: ASP.NET MVC 2 Sample Application & Tutorial.

Index:

IPTV #1: Introduction
IPTV #2: Video Signal Path
IPTV #3: DISH Command Signal Path

One of the cool things about being a software developer is that occasionally you get to work on some really neat projects.

Last year, the taxpayers of Nez Perce County, my employer, authorized the construction of a new jail facility. As part of the construction of this facility we were tasked with implementing an IPTV system for the inmates (I’m not much for giving prisoners access to television, but this is a legal requirement).

There are IPTV solutions on the market, but our research found them to be really expensive. As a county government we’re funded by taxpayers, of which I am one. So in a way, I work for myself, as do many of our employees who hold residence in Nez Perce County. Taxpayers like to keep costs down, so we looked at building our own IPTV solution.

The project was really fun and one of the most interesting projects I’ve worked on as a professional developer. Mainly because of the disparate technologies involved and the process of bringing all of these different pieces together into a cohesive and working solution. Several people in our department contributed to the success of the project; we did a ton of research into hardware solutions and worked hard to find the right mix of hardware and software so that we could achieve our goals and yet still succeed on a relatively small budget. The result of our effort was a combination of hardware and software that allowed us to multicast DISH Network satellite streams over an isolated internal network and to remotely control the television sets with a client-server software package written entirely from scratch in C#.Net.

With the system we created, the control of the televisions (channel changing, volume, power) was taken out of the inmates hands. Thus, the inmates do not have access to small, plastic remote controls that can be easily broken (and cost money to replace) and used as weapons. Instead, our jailers control the televisions remotely through a Windows application:

To build this system we had to utilize a lot of different technologies:

Hardware:

• DISH Network Satellite Receivers
• Osprey 450e Video Capture Device
• Tornado Set Top Boxes
• Vizio Flatscreen Television sets
• Global Cache CG-100 Network Adapters

Software

• C#.Net Client and Server applications
• NHibernate
• SQL Server 2005
• Fluent NHibernate
• WCF Duplex Channels
• VideoLAN (Open Source Media Player)

In future posts I’ll detail how we pulled all this together.

Very cool: http://should.codeplex.com/

Where are we?

In the future, where mankind has figured out how to harvest the ore of the moon and use it as a fusion-based energy source. According to the Lunar Industries advertising campaign, this fusion-based energy accounts for 70% of the planet’s total energy consumption. And it’s all thanks to the hard work of people like Sam Bell.

Or more specifically – just Sam Bell.

Sam, played brilliantly by the versatile Sam Rockwell, is at the end of a three-year contract. His job is that of caretaker; responsible for welfare of the automated harvesters that comb the lunar landscape and process the topsoil for the precious H3 ore. Sam’s job is to handle what cannot be automated, which involves periodically rendezvousing with the harvesters when they are full and shipping their ore back to Earth. He passes his time jogging on a treadmill, carving intricate buildings into a replica of his hometown, watering plants, and listening to video messages from his wife and daughter back on Earth. With the exception of his robot companion, GERTY (voiced by the familiar Kevin Spacey in a role that strongly evokes the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey), he’s all alone.

Sam has two weeks left on his contract. He desperately wants to go home and see his wife and daughter. “Three years is a long haul”, he says. We see he means it with every ounce of yearning on his face. The long stretch might be a bit more bearable if it were not for the broken communication system on the lunar station that doesn’t seem high on the priority list for Lunar Industries to fix. Sam is only able to get video messages from his wife via Jupiter satellite relays on tape delay. He’s lonely. It’s time to go home.

The last two weeks on the lunar station should be as boring as the first two. But if you’ve seen the trailer then you know something happens. I will not reveal exactly what that something is, because to do so would spoil the film. The trailer does a good job of creating some ambiguity; there are a few possibilities as to what might have actually happened and keeping the audience guessing, at least for a little while, is a strength of the film.

The “surprise”, however, is revealed fairly early on (and many movie goers will be able to riddle it out anyway), but that isn’t the point: the film is not just about the surprise. The film is about reality, and more precisely our perception of that reality. And our expectations. Sam discovers things about himself that he didn’t know, and it is this discovery – and the way Sam handles this new information – that is at the heart of the film. We might not fully agree with the way Sam handles his situation or the way he reacts to things, but that is because we’re not Sam. We’re different, and our perceptions are different.

Moon is very much a throwback to the science fiction films of old. Director Duncan Jones writes that he is a big fan of films like Outland and Alien; films “where blue collar workers tried to maintain there humanity in dehumanizing, off-Earth environments”. You can feel the influence in every frame of Moon. This is a character-driven film; it’s about emotions and motives and the way people think and behave. And it is simply amazing.

If there’s a downside to Moon, it is that it has such a limited distribution right now. I had to travel two hours to Spokane, WA to see it. I doubt it will play anywhere near where I live by the time its run is over. Which is a shame, because for people who really love film and can appreciate a great story, Moon is something that should be seen. It’s certainly much better than some of the summer’s other science fiction offerings (I’m looking at you, Transformers and you, Terminator: Salvation).