I used to be someone that tried to ignore politics like the plague, but as I grow older I find that I am becoming more and more interested in it. I have a feeling that it is related to my growing interest in financial markets, and given that politics has a tremendous impact on economics and financial markets, then it is natural to extend that interest to politics as well.

When I read that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace prize for his contributions to raising awareness for man-made climate change I thought it was well deserved. He has done more good for this cause than dare I say Greenpeace. Take note hippies, wear a suit and your message on environmentalism might be taken more seriously. Not that I have anything against Greenpeace. I used to be affiliated with them a long time ago, and I think that their website is one of the best resources on environmentalism. I just don’t think that the actions taken by extreme environmentalists are that effective anymore, or if they ever were for that matter.

So what do I think environmentalists should invest their time and effort in? Well instead of nagging everyone on how to save the planet, like walk to work instead of drive and stuff like that, how about play the capitalist game and start up a green business like GoGet Car share. At least this way you are providing people with the convenience of a car within a community in a cost effective way, and reducing the number of cars on the road as a result.

A couple of graduates recently started at ThoughtWorks Australia, and it was quite exciting to hear about their experiences at ThoughtWorks University in Bangalore. They spent the last 6 weeks in the Bangalore office learning about Agile software development, business analysis techniques, and object oriented programming. It brought back fond memories of my experiences at Immersion, which was not too long ago. There aren’t many companies that I know of that send their graduates overseas for induction, training, and an experience that will last a lifetime.

So it gives me great disappointment to find that there are not a lot of students in their final year of university in Australia that are aware of the opportunities on offer at ThoughtWorks. In fact I doubt many have even heard of ThoughtWorks. A couple weeks ago I accompanied a couple of my colleagues to UTS to give a presentation on what makes ThoughtWorks a great place to work, and to raise awareness of our graduate opportunities. We advertised the presentation, and even offered a chance to win a free iPod. We ticked all the right boxes according to Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. Guess how many students turned up? You are probably thinking the whole school of computer science right? Wrong. Would you believe zero, nudda, a big fat donut?!! Maybe university students in Australia have not heard of ThoughtWorks, or maybe they all have iPods.

So which companies will this year’s IT graduates be applying for? My guess is that they will be applying to the big 5 banks, Telstra, IBM, and HP, as they are all perceived to be safe career choices. Personally, I just don’t see the appeal of working for a big company, especially in the IT industry. If you want to improve your technical skills you have to work on a number of varying projects in different environments so that you can continually challenge yourself. Working for a consultancy like ThoughtWorks definitely exposes you to a lot of projects, and different technologies. I have worked at three different financial institutions in two different states so far this year, and each of these projects have given me the opportunity to further develop my technical capabilities. It would be hard to find this accelerated career development anywhere else.

If you want to be all you can be, then join the army. If you want to work for an exciting technology company and learn from the best in the IT industry then join ThoughtWorks. We have a number of awesome graduate opportunities on offer for developers and business analysts, so check them out.

I will be attending the Research Conversazione at my old Alma Mater, the University of Sydney at the end of the month to check out the best final year student projects. Hopefully the event will restore my faith in the next wave of IT graduates. I have high expectations given that most of the winners of the recent ACM computing challenge were from the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales.

One of the pain points of pair programming is having to use different IDEs, especially if your team doesn’t standardise on a particular IDE. On the last few projects that I worked on, I found myself constantly shifting between IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse, and switching between the different key mappings became annoying and sometimes disruptive.

In the end I discovered shortcuts in IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse that would make pair programming a lot easier. So instead of asking your pair what the shortcut is for a particular action in an IDE that you are not familiar with, you can just type Ctrl+Shift+A in IntelliJ IDEA or Ctrl+3 in Eclipse. Both of these commands will bring up a Mac-like Quicksilver prompt for you to type in an action that you want to launch.

For example, if you wanted to organise all your imports in a class, and you don’t know that it is either Ctrl+Shift+O in Eclipse or Ctrl+Alt+O in IntelliJ, then you can just bring up the action prompts and type in “import”, select the organise/optimise imports from the list of import options and hit enter, and magically your imports are reorganised.

The action prompt works for most commands that you want to do in both IDEs, so it makes it easier for you and your pair to switch between each other’s preferred IDEs without too much hassle.