Internships
If you’re interested in an internship with Gestalt’s Joplin office, please send your resume to my email address: jhoover at gestalt-llc.com. I’ll make sure your resume gets to the right people within Gestalt.

Agile Software Engineering
Some of the agile software engineering best practices I mentioned during the presentation were Test Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Integration (CI). Since MSSU is focused on .NET, here are some links that might be helpful related to TDD and CI:

• NUnit – .NET unit testing framework
• CruiseControl.NET – .NET continuous integration server
• CruiseControl.NET with Visual Studio 2005 project tutorial

YouTube Videos
Coco had asked how Gestalt was using YouTube. I mentioned that we used it as part of a recruiting effort. We had a contest open to the employees to see who could make the coolest recruiting video on YouTube. The results of that contest can be found here. The winner (as voted on by Gestalt employees) was John Moffet’s PatrolNet Woes. In an act of shameless self-promotion, I’m embedding my video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recommended Read
A book I’m in the process of reading that I think would be extremely beneficial for college students to read is My Job Went To India. I’m about a third of the way through and the advice is practical and especially relevant for those entering the IT workforce these days.

RSS
There were some questions about RSS during the presentation. May I suggest checking out the Gestalt Blogs RSS feed? This feed has all the posts from Gestalt bloggers, with quite a few being out of the Joplin office. My personal favorite combo for subscribing to and reading RSS feeds is Firefox and Google Reader.

Open Source
Below are the links to all our current Open Source projects:

• JBI Binding Components
  • RSS BC
  • SIP BC
  • UDDI BC
  • XMPP BC
• Other Gestalt Open Source Projects
  • Encoding Service Engine
  • JBI Mock Framework
  • Openfire Packet Listener

Remember to look into joining an Open Source project. While I don’t have any specific recommendations on projects to join (other than our own!), I can definitely recommend reading the book Producing Open Source Software. You can get a free PDF and HTML version of the book.

Josh Berkus is a lead developer for PostgreSQL. While MySQL often gets the glory, PostgreSQL has quietly earned respect by hardcore database people. I’m one of those people who has a lot of respect for the PostgreSQL project as a whole, so when one of the lead developers expresses a strong opinion I’m prone to listen. (Plus, the guy has one of the best first names ever.) Josh’s main point is that it’s too easy to say that successful open source projects need to have a benevolent dictator. There are all sorts of models that have succeeded. PostgreSQL is a democracy. Debian is a chaotic democracy. Apache is a bureaucracy. MySQL is a company. Java is a mixed bag of everything. But, it’s more fun to look to the benevolent dictator for quotes and it’s more convenient to sum up the success of open source project leadership in two words.

There has to be clear leadership for any software project, open source or not. I think the important thing to keep in mind is that open source software has been successful with various models of project leadership. The benevolent dictator is one model that has worked for Linux and others, but it is only one of many.

I realize this conclusion will likely disappoint one of my Gestalt comrades who sometimes fancies himself a benevolent dictator, but it had to happen sooner or later. At least he’ll always have “The Lovinator”, which is something that is ALL his and likely always will be. Dictate away!