Sonny Gill

Re: Tax. I am not sure. But I remember it being around 10% back when I was there. That is the tax you pay if you are considered a resident which for taxation purposes used to be more than 6 months or something like that. To be sure, you could ask your company HR.. they should know about it.

Living cost can be anywhere between MYR 2000 - 5000 depending on how you want to live.
And if you are staying longer than 6 months, your tax rate should be much lower.

Tim, the Heatmap idea is really great.. thanks for posting that.

Incidentally, a couple of days ago Martin Fowler posted a nice entry that I think has much relevance for this topic - http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TradableQualityHypothesis.html.

I have done at least one distribted Agile (Scrum) project at my company that worked quite well (see http://www.xebia.com/distributed-agile). One of the critical factors that made Agile work for us was that the whole team was collocated for the first four weeks (2 sprints) of the project, and we kept on bringing the whole team together at regular intervals afterwards (1 sprint every 4 to 6 months).

That is a great question Tom.

I think I see a difference in what is intended and what happens in practice.

In practice, when a new project is started with Scrum, many teams seem to focus on quickly delivering functionality without spending sufficient time on "just enough" design. This may partly be because the team is trying to convince the customer or the client that Scrum works, and Agile is the way to go. The only thing that the customer understand is the functionality being delivered, hence this disproportionate emphasis on quickly reaching a high velocity.

I am really interested in hearing what Jeff and Tim have found in their practice too...

I think a lot of those questions are for companies in India.

Many of these companies have hundreds or thousands of programmers, and quite high rates of attrition. Every year they have to hire hundreds of new people. As a result, each company has its own formula (or procedure) for deciding the salary based on the number of years which after all is the most visible factor if you don't have the skills or inclination to understand each person at a more personal level.

Related: Peter Norvig (author of AIMA book, director of research @ Google) wrote an article, The Machine Age, for NY Post yesterday. http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_machine_age_tM7xPAv4pI4JslK0M1JtxI (print-friendly page).

2500 per month for living expenses sounds about right. Of course it depends on where you live - In the center of the city a 1 BR apartment will cost you that much. But there are many good residential areas where you can get a 2 BR apartment for around 700 - 800.

The salary is decent, but not great. Again it depends on what kind of experience you have. For 7 years of experience, the salary can be anywhere between RM 4000 - 7000 depending on your skills.

Another interesting discussion I came across a while ago about TDD http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=216434

+1 for Swiz http://swizframework.org/

It has built in support for Spring like dependency injection, event mediation, and very simple controller layers that pass on your calls to the service objects.
It is relatively new, but I found it to be very stable, and the dev team is very responsive - http://groups.google.com/group/swiz-framework (requires google login).
The best thing about it is that it does not try to too much itself, but makes it easy for you to write good Flex code.

Our team had started off using Cairngorm, and I was looking for better alternatives. I had a brief look at Mate and PureMVC before I delved deeper into Swiz, and liked it immediately. From Java land, it makes me think of Stripes Framework, whereas PureMVC or Mate will be like Wicket or Tapestry

Like Joel, I also use IDEA for Flex 3 development. The new 9.0.* versions have very good support for Flex development.
The only thing it lacks is a visual layout designer. For all other tasks, the IDEA support for code completion, refactoring etc. is much better than Flex Builder.
Our team has Flex Builder licenses, but the only time I use it is when I need to do some trial-and-error visual design of a Flex screen.

From what I remember, you were allowed to use the logo on your visiting card, but there are conditions attached, for example, that the logo should not be too prominent on your card.
You really should check it by contacting Sun from their logos site. They used to be pretty responsive.
Also see SCP logo usage guidelines

Ha ha.. reminds me of Erik Naggum's XML Rant - http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html

Poonam Dhillon wrote:
...and then further it uses “WTF”. Too obscene..

What is so obscene about "Worse Than Failure"?
(The Daily WTF - About)

Yup

Another favourite is -

Dennis: Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
King Arthur: Bloody peasant!
Dennis: Oh, what a giveaway! Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about! Did you see him repressing me? You saw him, Didn't you?

Never fails to cracks me up.