I am writing this to let people that are thinking about going through the process for an E3 visa know that while there are a lot of forms to fill in, the process is overall very painless. The actual interview session, which is the part most people are most worried about, took no more than two minutes.

What follows are the tips and processes that I followed. This is by no means legal advise, but is what I did to successfully secure my working visa.

• Have your new employer complete a Labor Condition Application - this is key, and best to get done early on. An LCA certifies that your new job is a ’specialty occupation,’ and is a simple form for your employer to fill out. This will get approved within a couple of days
• Sign up for VisaPoint - this is the U.S. Embassy’s online visa system, and allows you to book your interview and fill out forms
• Fill out your forms - through VisaPoint, you can fill out your DS-156, which is the main application form. You must fill this out online, but since the system takes the information you put into VisaPoint it makes it easier anyway. If you are a male aged between 16 and 45, you must also fill out a DS-157, which is linked from within VisaPoint and asks a few questions about whether you have ever performed military service and the like. You can fill the DS-157 out by hand.
• Make your appointment - do it early. While I was able to get an appointment within a week, it can get busy. You do this through VisaPoint.
• Be prepared - this, in my opinion, is the most crucial step in the process. Before my interview, I went back and got references from many previous employers, recruiters, a University Academic Registrar, and even my high school computers teacher. The key is to show a high level of skill over a long period of time (which was not the 15 years the embassy recommended, though). If you have your University degree, get your transcript. Collect as much information as you can, put it in a folder with your visa, DS-156, DS-157, and LCA ready for the day. You will also need a self addressed Express Post Platinum satchel, and will have to pay your application fee at the Post Office (ask at the counter for the Non-Immigrant Visa Application Fee, $180 at the time of writing). Make sure you bring the envelope and receipt for the payment on the day.
• On the day - first and foremost, wear a suit. A lot of people don’t, but it makes you look and feel far more legitimate and professional if you do. These people must judge your character in a very short period of time, so anything you can do to make yourself look trustworthy is helpful. On the day, the process is:
  • Check in with security, have your visa ready for this
  • Queue and wait to be called for the person that checks your forms. This is not the interview, but instead just an officer that makes sure you’ve brought everything
  • If you have everything, you will be put into another queue to wait to be called to the special elevator, which will take you to another security checkpoint, followed by another waiting room.
  • After waiting in this new waiting room, you will be called to hand in your forms and passport, then (wait for it) - be asked to go back and wait to be called again.
  • You will be called back again - and this is the actual interview. You will be asked about your academic and employment background, and also about your ties to Australia (this is a non-Immigrant visa, after all). To satisfy the ‘ties’ requirement, you need only to have family left over here. The academic and employment part is completely up to the interviewing officer - in my case, he trusted that I was suitably qualified just on my word (this is where the suit comes in handy) and did not even look at my references. Despite this, I would never try it without having lots of documentation.
  • Head home, and wait for your passport to be delivered back to you in your Express Post satchel with a shiny new U.S visa inside

The whole process of going to the embassy took around three hours, but 99% of this is waiting in queues. Do not be discouraged by the information from the embassy - when it comes down to it, the only requirements are a DS-156, DS-157, LCA, Express Post satchel, receipt for the application fee, and your Australian passport. The rest is just proving you’re worthy, and the really key things are: get as much documentation on your work and academic history as possible, be organized and keep everything together for the day, and on the day dress professionally.

If anyone looking to get an E3 would like to discuss the process further, I’d be happy to help. Leave a comment or get me on the contact page.

For a start, I truly want to publicly thank the guys at Happener. Markus and Greg totally blew away any and all preconceptions I had about recruitment by being personal, fun, and actually caring about the outcome. It pains me to put them in the same category as recruiters. These guys went so far above and beyond the call of duty, and have become both people I respect greatly, and very good friends. If you are sick of the old ‘bums in seats’ approach to recruiting, give these guys a call - they are in the business of hooking up fantastic companies with fantastic people. In any event, I’ll have more to say about them some other time…

Secondly, I’d love to give a big shout out to the folks at Massive Interactive, who I have been working with for the last two months. Had I not had the opportunity to travel to SF, I would have signed with them permanently in a heartbeat - they are a bunch of incredibly smart people working on incredibly cool things. I hope that if I do come back to Australia to live in the future, they might consider having me back. This is despite them being a .NET house, and me being an OS guy, so that has to tell you something.

I’d also like to thank all the fine people at 3jam, the company that I’m trekking across the world to be involved in. They have bent over backwards to help me out at every stage, and I look forward to meeting them all over a few beers tomorrow night.

Then, there are all the wonderful friends in Sydney. You are all fantastic people, and having so many come up to me at STUB to wish me well last night was a fantastic feeling. While I haven’t been a Sydney boy for that long, you have all been very welcoming, and are very important to me in your own special ways. I look forward to coming back for visits, and I hope that if any of you find yourselves in San Francisco that you get in touch.

Of course, I wouldn’t be at this point in my life without the help and guidance of my parents, and the companionship of my girlfriend. But I will be talking to them in a not-so-public forum…

There will be a few posts coming up over the next few weeks about the process I’ve gone through to get here, and of course the experiences I’ll be having over there. I especially want to post information about the visa process, which was far easier than I thought it would be, even though I have never completed my University degree. Stay tuned, and I’ll be life streaming the whole trip on Twitter and Brightkite, of course.

Sure, their actual uptime rating might not be so bad, but it is one of those services that people (including me) really miss when it isn’t there. Like a comfy pair of shoes, we don’t appreciate it enough when it’s here, but can’t walk properly when it’s gone. Or something.

In any event, while I’d love to switch to a service with 100% uptime (which probably doesn’t exist), I really do love Twitter. When it’s good, it’s good.

The Schmap guys were nice enough to pass on to me a code that will let you access the Schmap iPhone interface before it launches on Monday. To get a sneak-peek, browse to http://schmap.com/iphone on your iPhone and enter the access code 724627.

The cartoon series, which should debut in mid-June, will appear both in the print edition of the Tampa Tribune, and on the newspaper’s website. I will post a link to the cartoon when it is available online.

Once you have an MMS compatible handset, simply:

1. Log in to Brightkite and select Account settings from the left of the screen
2. Click the Mobile tab
3. Scroll to the bottom and find your unique account email address, program this into your phone or remember it
4. On your mobile phone, create a new MMS message
5. In the To field, instead of putting in a phone number, put your Brightkite email address
6. Put the standard SMS commands into the body of the message. These can be found in the Brightkite help, but the basic ones are:
   • @placemark or @full address to check-in
   • !message to post a message and attach it to your current location

Using this method also means you can post photos to Brightkite from your phone. To do so, just add the photo in the body of the MMS message, and the text you want to go with it in the Subject field.

Enjoy, and feel free to add me as a friend over on Brightkite.

The tool now carries one of the most attractive names around: TweetDumpr. With it, you can export your entire Twitter timeline to a CSV (comma separated value) file, which can be read by any spreadsheet application. To get around the lingering privacy issues, the tool now requires you to authenticate to Twitter first, which makes sure you are only dumping your timeline and not someone else’s.

Currently, the tool only works on public timelines, but a new version is already in the works that handles protected users. Feel free to give it a go and report back on bugs that you encounter - it is still in the early stages of development.

As part of developing the Twitter Stats application, I created a standalone script that will dump a user’s entire Twitter timeline to a CSV file (comma separated value, readable by spreadsheet applications such as Excel), including the tweet text and the post time.

Initially, it was my intention to release this script to the public. I had several requests from people that wanted to have a record of all their tweets, which I kindly provided for them, and in my opinion the tool would prove quite useful.

After mentioning this to a couple of very smart people, they raised privacy concerns and suggested I keep the code to myself, which I have done thus far. These concerns stem from the fact that the tool can dump any user’s entire non-protected timeline, not just your own. Personally, I don’t really think this is a huge problem - if you have an unprotected timeline, all your tweets are public record anyway, the tool just makes it easier to extract and save these tweets. On the other hand, someone having a local copy of your stream does sound like a worrying proposition.

Clearly, there are far larger privacy issues associated with all of this, but I wanted to open up the floor and find out what other people think of the possible release of this tool. Should I put it out there, or keep it to myself?

I have long had a belief that universities are, by and large, completely out of touch with the real world. This may not count for all universities/colleges or their staff, but in my experience most work given is largely pointless and taught by lecturers that have never been out of the academic environment - meaning they have no idea how things happen ‘out there.’

As I said, this probably doesn’t count for all lecturers and professors, but most that I know have finished high school, gone straight to study in a university, perhaps undertaken research, then right on into lecturing. It is this lack of real-world experience that prompts them to issue work that does not help prepare students for the outside world.

There are certain things that I believe that all students should learn, and while they might not be used generally in the workplace, they are things they provide a solid grounding for future thinking. This kind of work is fine, but there is so much pointless work that doesn’t fall into this category, and I honestly feel sorry for those students that leave university with no concept of the workplace. I have spoken to several students in this exact predicament recently.

I have with me an assignment that was issued in an Australian university just a few weeks ago, one which I believe perfectly highlights this point. I will not reveal the university it was given at, nor will I reproduce the content in it’s entirety, but I will highlight a few points that I feel are, quite frankly, ridiculous.

To start, this assignment requires the student to write a CGI application using C/C++, and includes the line:

“…your CGI program will need to update a data file (using a database from C++ is simply too painful).”

Not good enough. The course that this assignment relates to specifically targets programming for the internet, and this is a third year subject - by this point, database usage should be mandatory for this kind of task.

“It is not common practice to write client-side JavaScript from scratch! Instead, you notice a web-site that has an interesting feature - view source.”

Sure, in a lot of cases developers don’t write code from scratch, but they also don’t steal code from other pages. Many developers write Javascript code with frameworks such as jQuery and Prototype (myself included), students should be encouraged to explore code reuse through these methods instead of just ripping code off other websites. It is a complete lie that it is common practice not to write code from scratch - a lot of work requires it.

“Your overall task is to write a report detailing how you completed the various subtasks listed below. You will be marked on your report.”

Yes, not marked on the work itself, but instead a report on you doing the work. Surely the marker can at least take a gander at the work itself.

“Your web should be composed of material that you might later wish to post to your Facebook or MySpaces web site”

Sorry, just had to highlight the poor grammar as well.

The ‘web’ must include:

“A section using an IFRAME to include a separate file that contains visitor comments presented in a HTML table. This separate file gets updated by the CGI program when a viewer submits a comment.”

There are so many reasons why having a CGI program that writes out a static HTML file that is included with an IFRAME isn’t the best way to do comments on anything. Again, this is a final year subject, this should all be dynamic.

“The comment should be checked to detect < signs, or the % equivalent, in case a hacker is trying to inject scripting code or other problematic data.”

With no explanation at all why this would be problematic, or indeed any pointers to how to better protect yourself from injection attacks.

“The file with the table of comments (’Comments.html’) should be created initially with simply the HTML markup for the table and its column headers. This file should be placed in a ‘data’ subdirectory of your public_html directory and should created with global write permission.”

Clearly, anytime that a web server needs to write to a file, said file should have global write permissions.

“Traditionally, [removed] involved a lengthy but easy exercise on Apache configuration … but things are just becoming too simple. On Windows - install Apache means double click on a file icon. Most Linux systems these days come with Apache pre-installed … it just isn’t fun any more.”

So instead of actually covering the setup of a web server in a course that’s description references ’server technology,’ the student is instructed to just use the defaults provided by install packages. It might be right that Apache and the like are far easier to install these days, but this doesn’t mean a student shouldn’t learn why the defaults set up by these installer scripts are the way they are, and how to change them.

I really could go on and on about this, but this assignment is comprised wholly of tasks that are either never used in the real world, or that point students in the wrong direction on practices that are used in the workplace. From what I have seen, this kind of thing is the norm rather than the exception.

I am not trying to start a flame war here, but instead to highlight the fact that students leaving university should be prepared to face life outside of academia. If you have had better experiences, please post a comment. Please also do the same if you agree.

In the month-and-a-half since I started the wiki at ObsoleteSkills.com (thanks again for the idea, Scoble), it has been linked to from a whole bunch of blogs and websites, generating almost 3 million visits. Big name sites including BoingBoing, Slashdot, and Daring Fireball have all given me the privilege of a link. What really surprises me, though, is the percentage of traffic generated from each of these sources.

Above is a graph compiled from the top referrers to ObsoleteSkills.com. Looking at this graph reveals a few surprises: most notably that the majority of visits didn’t actually have a referrer, meaning people are just typing the domain into their browsers or using bookmarks, etc. This would imply that a lot of the traffic is from returning users, which is great.

Slashdot and StumbleUpon were, predictably, the next biggest referrers. I was surprised to see how little of the traffic came from David Pogue’s blog, which would seem to be a fairly high-traffic blog, and from BoingBoing, which is one of the most popular blogs around. It is also worth noting that Daring Fireball only linked to the site two days ago, so this won’t be representative of the actual percentage of referrers it might send.

Just so that there is a bit of scale to the graph, the lowest referrer to ObsoleteSkills.com shown on the graph (Gamespy Humor) represents a little over 32,000 visits, and there are obviously a bunch more referrers not showing on the graph.

Note: I’ve mixed the spelling of referrer on purpose, see Wikipedia for details.