If you want to attract attention by a prospective employer and get an interview, your resume needs to be well-crafted. It needs to read concisely and clearly, presenting you in the best possible manner. Most importantly, your resume needs to quickly explain why YOU are right for THEIR specific opening.

You should expect to tailor your resume for EVERY job to which you apply. I’m not kidding, and no, this is not about lying or misleading. The WORST thing you can do is pad your resume with technologies you barely (or completely do not) understand, pretend you had a management role when you didn’t, or talk about experience you simply do not have. You may get a phone or in-person interview, only to fail the interview very badly. Honesty, accuracy, and completeness is critical to convey a good character. You also need to put yourself in the best possible light and present yourself as positively as possible. I’ve hired numerous people for companies, and I can usually tell if a resume is embellished. I’m hardly an HR expert either.

Here is a list of do’s and don’t for writing your resume:

1. Have a cover letter. Expect to custom write this for each employer, possibly from a reusable template that you’ve created.
2. Always speak directly to the company to whom you are applying in your cover letter
3. Your cover letter should use persuasive language to explain WHY you are the best fit for their specific needs. Talk about how their needs match your skills and experience. Talk enthusiastically about how you can tackle their issues. Do not be generic. You need to genuinely show them that you are speaking to them and their needs, and not using generic language, or empty buzzwords. Read your cover letter to someone (ideally a professional) and get their feedback on its sincerity, clarity and persuasiveness.
4. Communicate that you understand their business as well, that it is the exact industry and type of business for you (products/services, size, number of employees, age of the business, physical location, niche, etc.), and why they need you to help their company.
5. Do not include ANYTHING superfluous or otherwise unessential in your cover letter or resume. Do not include a summer bartending job, or hobbies, or personal items that are not directly relevant to the job itself. You need to present a mature and direct in appearance at all times. Any work experience that isn’t directly relevant to the job should not be listed.
6. For each job, describe your title, what you achieved and be sure to detail the technical components used (whether you worked with Struts or JMS, etc.).
7. If you managed people, be sure to communicate that convincingly. That means you had responsibility to hire/fire staff, you had one or more people who reported directly to you, you assigned work to one or more people on a regular basis, you set budgets and project timeframes, you created or provided significant assistance with estimates and proposals, you were held accountable and responsible for the results of a team effort, etc.
8. List all technical skills and expertise that you have, but emphasize the skills they most want. Don’t bury the five skills the employer most wants to see on your resume. And do list knowledge of specific 3rd party libraries, frameworks, tools, and operating environments. This is one place where you can be very inclusive, so long as you don’t stretch the truth. If you don’t remember C programming from college, don’t list it as your top skill, or leave it off altogether.
9. Do list any outside or personal projects you’ve done that show initiative and expertise with Java. Its sad that I see so many resumes and none of them show that the person has any interest in their field beyond collecting a paycheck. Do you post answers to stackoverflow? Did you contribute to an Apache project? Did you develop a freeware or shareware app on your own? Did you experiment with a cutting edge technology? DO include these things. You will stand out as someone who really likes their work and is engaged.

You know you’ve written a good cover letter and resume when you get a call-back for every job posting that is a close match to your skills and experience. Keep track of your results and make adjustments. In general, you should expect to send at least twenty resumes for every call-back, depending on where you live and the overall economy.

I’ll talk about the interview process in an upcoming post.

If you want to do software development in the financial industry, knowing FIX will make you very valuable.

Java has an excellent, and widely used, FIX engine implementation, called QuickFixJ (quickfixj.org). You can download it for free, and begin learning basic FIX functionality.

The most important concept to understand when working with FIX is that it is a messaging protocol that supports every conceivable type of financial instrument. FX, stock, options, derivatives, commodities are all supported by the specification, which you can download by registering on the FIX Protocol website.

the next most important concept to understand about FIX is that it is implemented as an asynchronous communication protocol. Parties to a FIX connection process messages asynchronously.

Working with FIX is an excellent opportunity to gain experience with asynchronous programming and multi-threaded programming. Multi-threaded programming has gained significant attention in recent years as the cost of CPU time has declined, and multi-CPU processors have become standard in the market.

If you want to learn some basics and get experience working with FIX, setup an initiator and acceptor service, and then begin to send and receive some simple application (business) messages, like a request for a quote or a trade. Getting a client and server engine up and running is relatively easy.

You’ll get familiar with system level messages (as defined in the FIX spec) right away. Logon and Heartbeat messages will become very familiar.

the primary interface is the Application interface. Implement this class in your FIX client or server so that your application can process messages, whether to send them or to receive them.

QuickFixJ’s download includes a bunch of extremely informative sample applications. You can run them out of the box and get familiar with the behavior, before looking under the cover.

Incidentally, if you want to study multi-threaded programming, one of the best Java books on the subject is: Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch and Joesph Bowbeer. It introduces the java.concurrent package, and the concepts behind many multi-threaded solution and strategy domains.

Apache Mina is a significant augmentation to the standard JDK concurrency package.

So if you want to prepare yourself to go do financial software development, you’ll be super attractive if you can say you understand and have experience with FIX, if only a little.

FIXProtocol.org
quickfixj.org
java.concurrent package
Apache Mina Project

Imagine you have an application or a process that does not support SSL. It needs to communicate or integrate with a service (remote or not) that requires an SSL connection. With STunnel, you can set it up to use a .pem SSL certificate file from the 3rd party SSL encrypted service. You can easily configure STunnel to run as a proxy service in the background, establish a connection to the SSL service, and open a non-SSL port as a listener service. Your app talks to STunnel, and STunnel forwards to the SSL service.

stunnel.conf needs only a few lines to do its job

cert = [path to the SSL certificate file (usually .pem)]
[tcp] – STunnel supports other protocols (pop3s, imaps, ssmtp, https….)
client = yes
accept = [port to listen on for the non ssl application requests]
connect = [hostname:port of the SSL service to connect to]

*One important note* STunnel has a default setting for the encryption key length. Versions up to 4.39 used 1kb key size. Versions after used a 2k key size. If you get a configuration error reading the key file, then it is likely due to STunnel expecting one thing and getting the other. You could modify the certificate using OpenSSL to specify the key length, you can modify the stunnel.conf file, or you can just use the appropriate version of STunnel.

The following error will occur if the key length employed in the .pem file is incompatible with the version of STunnel used:

SSL_CTX_use_PrivateKey_file: D0680A8: error:0D0680A8:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_CHECK_TLEN:wrong tag

http://openid.net/

Make it easy for people to register and use your site without requiring laborious registrations and forcing users to remember yet another user name and password.

The big difference is that Grails is built upon the Groovy language, which is itself built on top of Java. If you want to work with a language that vastly simplifies and economizes many of the things that require a lot of Java code, then Groovy is well worth looking at.

Grails doesn’t integrate as well with Maven, as its site layout is completely non-standard. But since deployment consists of war files, the end product (a deployable war file) is still the same.

If maven is critical and you want to work with Java, then Roo makes sense as a choice.

If you want a lot of convenience in wiring up and rapid prototyping, as well as having the convenience of Groovy, then Grails really makes sense.

I’d lean toward using Grails for rapid prototyping, and simpler web applications.

If I had to develop a first-class web platform with strict enforcement of types and data, I’d probably go with Roo, because it is built upon Java, Spring, Hibernate, and Maven.

There is absolutely no better education than on the job. And if you are just starting out, then make the best investment you can: get an internship. Whether it is paid or not, whether it is for a month, or a semester, it will be the single best thing you could do for your long-term career and resumé. Think of it as tuition. It is going to be more valuable than college credits because the gap between what you learn in the classroom and what is done in the office is huge. That is unfortunate, it shows no sign of changing soon, and its simply the reality of things.

Get an internship or starting position at a company that has a team of software engineers. You want to be on a team where you can learn from as many people as possible, see different styles and gain experience interacting with others. Sit with the programmers as they go through some tasks, a la parallel programming style. Look at their code and ask questions. Take on challenging tasks and ask for help as you go.

Try to choose a company that is doing interesting work, in an industry that interests you. Don’t look at classifieds, instead research companies that interest you, whether or not they are hiring. Then contact them, telling them why you are impressed by them and that you are interested in an internship. Often an unpaid internship can be renegotiated after a month or two for a wage or stipend. Prove your worth and a company will be able to justify paying you.

Nothing is more valuable than direct learning in a hands-on environment. After as little as 6 months, you will have acquired a level of experience and knowledge that will make you marketable. You may decide to stay at the company or move on. Either way, the first job you get is very important in setting your career for the long-term.

Groovy is a really nifty and super language that makes doing a lot of things much easier. XML, email, working with collections, rapid-prototyping, all are much more pleasant via Groovy.

Grails is a Ruby style convention over configuration framework that is built upon Groovy and uses Spring and Hibernate to provide a very rapid way to build web applications. With Grails you really can get an entire web application up much more quickly than if you started from scratch with Java and tried to wire together Maven, Spring, Spring MVC, Spring WebFlow, Hibernate, Logging, and the kitchen sink.

I was extremely impressed as well by the fact that you can directly call Java classes, and directly work with the Spring and Hibernate configurations. Grails isn’t rigid in that sense.

I’m definitely converted.

One solution is to simply store your eclipse configs in SVN. This really isn’t a bad idea and if you’re on a Mac, then TimeMachine – which is svn based – is already there to help. Otherwise you could create a directory in the svn repo that stores Eclipse config info, with subfolders if necessary for different programmers.

Eclipse config files consist of the following:
.classpath
.settings
.project

Its not fun modifying these by hand. You shouldn’t try.

If things get really bad, just delete these three files and then start with a fresh config.

You could create a dynamic webapp or a maven webapp archetype and then copy the Eclipse config files that are generated into your broken app’s root folder. You will have to modify the files slightly to use the correct project name but that should be it.

If you want to integrate Maven 2 with Eclipse, its possible, its easy, if you do it correctly.

M2Eclipse is the way to go. Install M2Eclipse and also the M2Eclipse extras.

http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/installing-m2eclipse.html

Forget about the maven eclipse:eclipse plugin and goals. Its just not up to par. You need M2Eclipse to modify your eclipse configs for your project. So import the project into Eclipse using File -> Import…->Maven->Existing Maven Project

You’ll be good to go.

BTW, Its not a bad idea to put your eclipse config files into svn, like a local repository. I’ve had many instances where Eclipse modified the config files and caused problems with the app. Troubleshooting a corrupted Eclipse config is not fun.