Mike Hodnick

"Tell me about yourself".

This is the first item I ask of interview candidates, and I'm suprised at how often it completely catches them by suprise or how they don't know how to answer the question. I've gotten responses from "what do you mean" to an entire detailed work history.

It is a tough question, but I think candidates have to know how to answer it. It's their 60-second chance to tell me what's important and relevant about their personality and their professional work history. It forces the candidate to have their thoughts organized and to be concise. Unfortunately most of the time their response results in train wreck of technical project details.

I don't expect a response that's perfect, but I'm looking to hear the candidate tell me about:

• Professional interests. e.g. hard-core programmer, .Net development, WinFX/WPF, Ajax, Agile Development, and Perl.
• Personality traits. e.g. enjoy working with people, have fun at work while being professional, refuse to work with end users.
• Work history. e.g. I was a Code Monkey and developed a Widget and a Thingamabob at Acme. I led a team of developers at Intertrode and successfully rolled out 4 large web apps.
• A few personal things. e.g. camping, hiking, playing drums, and watching kung fu

This topic in an interview isn't a make-or-break item, but it sets the stage for the rest of the interview. It gives the candidate a chance to shine and to let me know that they're serious about wanting to talk with me, about wanting the job, and that they've put some thought into what they want to tell me.

Someone in the Inetium office is messing with me. One day last week, and again yesterday, my Windows desktop wallpaper was automatically changed to this image:

I went to my Desktop properties to change it back to something else, but my wallpaper controls were disabled. What's also weird is that the image is "doctored". Most of the image is real - that is really me behind a goalie prop at the XCel Energy Center - but that flaming flag thing is not a part of the original image. Thus my research began...

• In the registry, my desktop wallpaper was pointing to an image named "hods.jpg" out on a share of our domain controller.
• I changed the registry value, but when I rebooted the setting was overwritten.
• Very few people in the office call me "hods". I have a lousy poker face, but did the best I could yesterday to try and snuff out the person that did this. Nobody fessed up.
• I talked to a couple of our domain admins and they couldn't figure out how the setting was being written, nor could they identify the the individual who put the image out on the share. The owner was only shown as "Administrator".
• I checked out the other profile folders under my Documents and Settings folder, and there was only one other one besides myself. That folder is the name of one of our old domain admins and it was created back in January 2005. I didn't see any evidence in there that he had logged in recently.
• I verified in my startup settings (using msconfig) that no special batch file or script is being run on startup.
• In the meantime I've eliminated all shared folders and have removed all known "extra" permissions to folders on my machine.
• I now have successful security events logged to my security log, so I can now find out if someone else is logging in to my machine.

Late yesterday after rebooting another time, my wallpaper settings were unlocked and I could change the wallpaper. I was never able to track down the perpetrator.

What's a bit annoying about all this is that I do demos and use my laptop with client users pretty often, so to unexpectedly see that image stretched across my screen when I log in at a client is a little awkward. But overall, I'd rather find out who is doing it than solve the problem. I guess I'll just see if the problem happens again.

I haven't posted in a while because things have been pretty busy in the office. I haven't had much time at all to continue my WPF research, but there are some other interesting things happening that I hope to write about in the near future.

VS .Net Solution Re-structuring - My development team that works on .Net apps for one of our clients is looking into restructuring the primary Visual Studio .Net solution that holds most of the app code. The way it is currently structured makes it difficult to develop, maintain, and deploy the applications. There are 24 projects in the solution, including web applications and shared assemblies. A new strategy for versioning and deployment is also in the works.

Not-so-shared web controls - I now have ownership of a common web controls project that is a part of the bigger solution named above. It was developed using web user controls but is being deployed for use by multiple web applications. Some trickery with virtual directories is used in an attempt to try and make these web controls "shared", but because of how ASP .Net caches assemblies, it causes many problems during deployment over the different web applications. Ideally I'd like to convert this project into a custom web server control library so that they can be truly shared, but there are over 75 web user controls that would need to be converted. I'm not sure if it will make sense to literally convert everything to custom web server controls, but what we're doing now doesn't work so well either.

Perhaps the biggest challenge will be to justify the time needed to work on these issues. Arguably, fixing these issues will result in much higher development productivity and smoother deployments in the future. Short term, the gains may not be noticeable - and will likely slow down any immediate development. Building up the case to work on these issues shouldn't be too difficult, but it will be necessary in order to justify working on them.