Top-Paid CEOs (Tech’s)

Forbes, as it does every year, has released its list of top executive salaries.

NAME | COMP | 1Yr. compensation | Rank@CEOs

Lawrence Ellison | Oracle | $192.9 M | 1

Nabeel Gareeb | MEMC Electronic Materials | $79.6 M | 6

John Chambers | Cisco Systems | $54.8 M| 19

Mark Hurd | Hewlett-Packard | $27.6 M| 56

Jen-Hsun Huang | NVIDIA | $24.6 M| 61

Samuel Palmisano | IBM | $24.3 M | 63

Wendell Weeks | Corning | $22.6 | 72

Joseph Tucci | EMC | 20 M | 87

William Sullivan| Agilent Technologies | $17.4 M| 102

Paul Otellini | Intel | $16.3 M | 109

Steven Jobs | Apple | $14.6 M | 120

Jonathan Schwartz | Sun Microsystems | $13.5 M| 130

RailsConf 2008

May 29-June 1, 2008
Portland, Oregon

RailsConf is the official event for the growing Rails community.

HR managers go for web2.0 to attract talent

At a seminar on “Innovative Hiring Strategies” organized by CII, recruiters said they are junking traditional talent tapping methods, and increasingly targeting social networking websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Jobster to identify and attract quality human assets. They said while the bulk of senior and middle level hiring may still be through employee and headhunter referrals, the situation is fast changing.

According to P. Rajendran, director and COO, NIIT, employee referrals account for 30% of their recruitments. He says with web2.0 gaining popularity, this number could go up 60% in future.

According to a survey by Kelly Services, 40% of the respondents found their most recent jobs online. So, companies are actively looking at social networking websites, in addition to web portals.

With recruiters increasingly relying on social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, to get the right man for the right job, what will happen to the traditional headhunter?

Rank of programming languages & TIOBE

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here

Rank Mar 2008	Rank Mar 2007	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Mar’08	Delta Mar’07	Status
1	1	=	Java	20.651%	+2.61%	A
2	2	=	C	15.593%	-0.04%	A
3	5	++	Visual Basic	10.795%	+2.65%	A
4	4	=	PHP	10.138%	+0.68%	A
5	3	–	C++	9.776%	-1.33%	A
6	6	=	Perl	5.781%	-0.64%	A
7	7	=	Python	4.593%	+0.70%	A
8	9	+	C#	4.143%	+0.78%	A
9	12	+++	Delphi	2.697%	+0.94%	A
10	10	=	Ruby	2.661%	-0.11%	A
11	8	—	JavaScript	2.462%	-1.02%	A
12	14	++	D	1.107%	-0.16%	A
13	13	=	PL/SQL	0.747%	-0.80%	A
14	11	—	SAS	0.630%	-1.22%	A-
15	18	+++	COBOL	0.615%	-0.03%	A-
16	21	+++++	Pascal	0.554%	-0.01%	B
17	17	=	Ada	0.485%	-0.17%	B
18	16	–	Lisp/Scheme	0.434%	-0.29%	B
19	19	=	FoxPro/xBase	0.423%	-0.18%	B
20	25	+++++	Lua	0.385%	-0.01%	B

Ruby On Rails Hosting:Brightbox

Traditionally, Ruby On Rails developers have had difficulty taking applications from their development systems to deployment (difficulties not experienced developing with PHP, ASP, or Java). But Brightbox, a U.K.-based startup showing off its wares at Startup Camp in London recently, specializes in Rails hosting.The idea really came from Rails development that Brightbox’s Jeremy Jarvis was doing along with his partners. When they had these deployment struggles, they built their own solution and gained some experience that others started to notice. As they began helping other development shops, Jarvis realized there was a business there and started Brightbox, which creates an optimized, flexibile, and easy-to-use service. He started the business last June and it went live in September 2007. (They have very cool T-shirts, too.)

Now, it’s only available today in the U.K. and Europe, so if you’re based in the United States … consider moving.The dedicated hosting service uses Xen to virtualize machines so that his customers have the ultimate flexibility; they can grow their servers as demands dictate, or ratchet down if need be.

Jarvis said that there are tools like Capistrano out there that help developers deploy applications, but Brightbox essentially created its own Capistrano recipes. Developers can download these to their own system and with a couple simple commands get it running on the server.Jarvis said Brightbox spends a good bit of time optimizing its servers to make them easy to use and stable.

Customers range from smaller Ruby developers up to Web development agencies, with a good deal of customers running Web 2.0 and social networking sites. Customers can choose the configuration from a pricing matrix, starting at 256 MB of RAM with a modest amount of storage, going up to a 4 GB dual-CPU box.

RadRails goes 1.0

RadRails, part of the Aptana IDE, is now available in version 1.0. The popular Rails development tool has been around for some time, but this latest version adds some useful new features for Ruby, as well as Ruby on Rails developers.

Highlights:

• Integrated Rails shell console
• Default-install and config of Ruby interpreter, database and debugger
  (Everything you need to get started fast)
• Code completion with type inferencing
• Code assist for Ruby, CSS, JS, and HTML inside RHTML files
• Type hierarchy view
• Go to declaration
• Call hierarchy
• Full implementation of RDT (Eclipse’s Ruby Development Tools project)
• Integrated Profiler (Pro Version Only)

RadRails Vs NetBeans Vs 3rdRail

http://www.aptana.com/rails#features

RoR developers:4 million by2013

According to Gartner, the number of Ruby On Rails developers will grow to some 4 million by 2013. While many of these will be hobbyists, Gartner believes the largest area of growth will be inside the firewall. There’s one problem. Until recently, there have not been any instrumentation or management tools, which IT shops see as a vital ingredient in getting things done. Enter FiveRuns, funded to the tune of $9 million by Austin Ventures.

FiveRuns is offering a hosted management service at $40 per server per month. Its Manage service lets users monitor performance deep into the application, helping developers understand how their application is impacted by databases, operating systems and other web services.

Today, FiveRuns claims 95 customers. I spoke with Investment Instruments, which is developing real estate solutions for the rental market. Its marquee offering for landlords is Rentomatic, which is used by landlords to manage rental units. Its other offering is Rentometer, a service that is designed to provide valuation transparency into the rental market for both landlords and tenants.

They say the value FiveRuns delivers comes from Investment Instruments developers’ ability to get visibility into the Rails environment without having to chase down server logs or find a support person. In other words, the developers can act as environment managers. Investment Instruments also says that FiveRuns gives them the means to take actions on flow queries which they see as an important part of what they need to do in order to optimize a complex environment that also includes integration to legacy systems. Net-net it means time and money saved in the development process.

FiveRuns’ goal is to become a complete Rails management provider but this is not necessarily going to be an easy nut to crack inside the enterprise. I spoke with industry analyst Michael Coté of Redmonk who said: “There is going to be a Rails explosion but there is no assured way to launch a scalable solution to the management problem. Right now, you’ve got to get the attention of the person who is deeply into Rails rather than thinking about the enterprise and that means entering the conversations that are going on in and around the Rails community. If FiveRuns can help stop developers shooting themselves in the performance foot then they’re going to get that attention.”

This is a space that is wide open but as noted, we are very early in the game. There is nothing to stop a Tivoli or CA from breezing into the space and attempting to eat FiveRuns lunch. My belief is that it is the vendor that successfully builds up the conversational community with Rails users that will outrun any incumbent player that tries to flip into this space.

Ruby on Rails steamrolls into Medical Council

The not-for-profit Australian Medical Council (AMC) will migrate most of its internal VB-based systems to the Web with the aid of the open source Ruby on Rails Web application framework, according to developers working on the project.
An independent national standards body for medical education and training, the AMC accredits Australian and New Zealand medical schools, courses and specialist training, and advises state and territory medical boards on registration of medical practitioners.
The AMC joins the small club of local enterprises using Ruby for software development, which combined with the Rails framework is renowned for its ability to deliver software projects rapidly.
AMC IT manager Sean O’Dowd told Computerworld the in-house Windows client/server legacy applications have been around for at least 10 years and have had one to three developers working on them during that time for “quite a lot of person years”.
“When I first saw Rails I was impressed at how it tied together the MVC and unit testing and is a best practice framework,” O’Dowd said. “I’ve worked in teams using ColdFusion and, like PHP, there was nothing encouraging programmers towards best practices in the development. With Rails we are encouraged to better manage the quality of our software.”
AMC’s first Rails application is already online and aims to cut down manual paper work for one process by 80 percent whilst improving the timeliness of our service to customers.
The application is for international medical graduates seeking registration to practise medicine in Australia.
“We have a two-year program where we want to replace in-house legacy systems as they are costing too much to maintain and can’t change as fast as the business does,” O’Dowd said. “We chose Rails as the technology to replace VB because it was an integrated best practice framework and there was enthusiasm within the team for this change. Rails is a very productive technology for developers with excellent coverage for our business requirements. Rails will do what the AMC requires very well; of course it is not for everyone.“
O’Dowd believes Ruby on Rails tends to “do the whole package”, whereas with Java and similar languages developers are “bolting on” a lot of different packages.
“Java is a very sophisticated and complex base product to which additional complexity is added to cover MVC, testing, continuous integration, and so on; this complexity is a concern to me,” he said.
The shift to Ruby on Rails also marks an architectural change for the AMC, which has had difficult experiences in deploying some in-house Windows applications.
“Rails deployment, if done correctly, is simple and efficient and is a pleasure to work with when combined with Agile practices such as test-driven development and continuous integration,” O’Dowd said.
The AMC’s first Rails app is running on a Windows platform but the next application will run on Linux.
O’Dowd said the software deployment tools for Rails are better on Unix and there are good tools to facilitate greater developer collaboration.
“This shift away from Windows makes managing the link to our legacy software and database an area for careful planning,” he said.
The AMC’s next move will be a new Web site and content system which may be based on the open source Joomla! CMS.
With more in-house software being developed, O’Dowd is not against the idea of the AMC open sourcing some of its applications to avoid high maintenance costs in the future, but believes producing better quality software will make people more willing to maintain it over time.