Amy & the girls spent the week in Tenants Harbor, ME. It's a beautiful place. It signals summer. It's special to us. It's where we got married. We've been climbing those rocks and jumping in the cold Atlantic and warming ourselves by that fire for 10 years.

I made pretzels for last week's Vikings Saints game. We had a bunch of people over and ate wings and drank beer and had an all american family afternoon. My (almost) two year old daughter calls these events "sissaball parties." I have know idea why she does this, but the name is a strangely appropriate way to describe a sport that features so many towering, corpulent hulks. So it stuck and now we feature regular sissaball parties.

What would you do if you were given three months off to do whatever it was you wanted to do? What if you were allowed to hit the pause button on your career, take a break from work during your prime earning years, and just do whatever it was you wanted to do?

This is not a list of my top three songs of last year (they weren't even released last year). They are not my favorite three songs of the year. They aren't even the songs I listened to the most. They are the songs I remember the most.

(all three songs are embedded below the fold)

I'm not going to offer anything groundbreaking here. But having worked with a variety of teams of talent over the years, I wanted to articulate what I think makes a good Java developer. By putting these thoughts down, I hope to forge a little more of a formal idea of what I'm looking for the next time I run into new talent and have to assess it and work with it.