Career
There are 14 entries for the tag
Career
One of my tweeps @mjeaton has asked his sphere of influence to follow on to his post on the same topic, so here we go. How old were you when you started programming? The first time I was exposed to programming was around age 10, someone introduced me to BASIC on an Apple IIe in 1987. I don't really remember what we did, as I was interested more in getting back to the game I was playing. This is probably indicative of why I'm not an alpha geek. All the alpha geeks quit playing games on their C64 in...
Title courtesy of Chris Chapman Some twittering this morning surrounding yesterday's ALT.Net summit got me to thinking about a broader principle that needs to be applied here. There is no growth within your comfort zone. If you always do that which is familiar, you reach a point of utter stagnation. Some call it a rut. Some call it doldrums. Call it what you will, but it's stagnation, made heavier by inertia. I talked about this before and I'll say it again: Sometimes you have to shock your system to make real progress. A lot of lashback for alt.net right now is...
Cold water stands before you. Maybe it's a pool, maybe it's a lake. What's the best way to handle it? Do you wade in, little by little, doing that little dance with your arms up in some unnatural Frankenstein pose, or do you jump right in, get it over with, and become acclimated all at once?
Sometimes you have to shock your system to make real progress. This is pretty much a univesally acceptable principle. You want to make big gains in the gym? You put your muscles through something they aren't used to, and tear them down so they can...
Apologies ahead of time if this comes out sort of stream-of-conscious... The years seem to be going by a lot faster these days. Maybe it's a touch of emo having turned 30 in February, maybe it's concern for my own mortality and the legacy I leave, maybe it's concern for how I see the next 30 years shaping up, maybe it's all or some of that and more. Lately though, I find myself thinking a lot about my career and the future thereof. I fell into this development thing in the late 90s, having always had a passion for computers...
I've toyed with the idea of going back to school and getting a CS degree before, and now I'm leaning toward trying to cobble together some sort of self-study program using MIT OCW and other resources...but then I'm thinking...if I'm going to do the work why not get the sheepskin? But then I'm thinking...cuz that takes time I don't have to actually...attend school...and there's no University within reasonable distance of me (lame I know), and I'm not sure about online learning...but I digress.
I was talking with someone today about it and I recalled the only formal programming education experienced I ever...
Scott posts his and asks for more, particularly from people like me. I went to college for history and poli sci and drinking and dropping out...not for comp sci. I did learn some things about software while in college...just not from college.
The List
People talk a better game than they play - don't get too caught up in the latest and greatest, or if you don't speak patterns, or if you never programmed a C64, because at the end of the day everyone does what they need to do to keep getting paid, everyone has written and...
Via Raymond, the idea is who would you give up a day to hang out with, learn from, etc?
So...many...people.
Hell, Raymond himself is one of those guys that you could just learn a ton from. Having spent some time working with him on a project, I know that I could learn a ton from him about Agile, TDD, and just the right way to do things.
Others on the list would be:
Scott Hanselman - What couldn't you learn from Scott? He's a mac-daddy pimp of a lot of different subjects, and just seems like a really cool guy to boot.
K. Scott Allen...
Okay well a few days ago I blogged about the absolute worst development job I (or anyone else I dare say) ever had. If you have one to top it, post it up and send me a link. We’ll make it a meme. Now I want to tell you about the second worst development job I ever had (Jeff demanded it, so I gotta). This one is bad in a completely different way from the last one, and in many ways it’s worse. Only a few people know I even had this job, and you will see why shortly...
I’ve mentioned some of my previous bad jobs in other posts, and said I’d blog about them. Forthwith is story #1. I want to talk a little about bad tech jobs, and the things I’ve learned from them, and maybe, hopefully, inspire some similar stories (unless you have had no bad tech jobs, in which case I hate you, and grats). So everyone has had a crap job, before they got into their chosen career, be it a college McJob or something you did on summer break in high school. But let’s talk about the crap development jobs we’ve had,...
Heard this week in an interview: “This area isn’t exactly a Mecca for IT”. Truer words were never spoken.
So…I live in Ocala, FL. I’ve mentioned it before. We are about 40 miles south of Gainesville, known primarily as the home of the UF Gators, the home town of Tom Petty and Danny Rolling (no meaning implied in their juxtaposition), and briefly starring as the home town of Keanu “whoah” Reeves and the ever-so-tasty Charlize Theron in The Devil’s Advocate (oddly enough Charlize played serial killer Eileen Wuornos, one of whose victims was from Ocala, and another was found here)...
"Learn at least one new [programming] language every year. Different languages solve the same problems in different ways. By learning several different approaches, you can help broaden your thinking and avoid getting stuck in a rut."
so sayeth the Pragmatic Programmers.
Last year’s language for me was Lua. I didn’t really say much about it, because…well, mostly lazy, but also I found limited application for it. It’s a nice tight little scripting language, it has high utility, loosely typed and very flexible.
Many games use Lua for interface modifiction scripting. World of Warcraft, for instance, which is why I learned it. The...
Over the years I’ve taken many a would-be programmer under my wing and showed him the ways of our world. Some of those mentorings turned out well, some not so much. It’s always been my firm belief however that if you are in a senior or lead position in software, it is your duty to mentor and almost create an apprenticeship relationship with the newbies in your charge, to prevent them from becoming bad programmers and ending up as lowlights on the blooper reels of the Daily WTF.
When I was coming up the software lead I worked for was a...
Derek over at ardent dev had some things to say about following instructions to get a job. And people lambasted him for it. Serious?
Having hired a person or two in my career, and been through some…interesting…interviews, I’m with Derek. Follow the damn directions. If I want your resume emailed to me, email it. If I want it delivered by mail, do that. If I want it delivered by carrier pigeon, you better fucking do it or I’m not reading it, and if I do actually read it, I’m already pissed at you for not doing it right, and I’m going...
I neglected to mention that Mike “CoyoteBoy” Earls also has quaffed the colored sugar water. Grats Mike.
Got me thinking about when I was working up in Boston, a guy on a different team that I used to take smoke breaks with went down to Connecticut and interviewed with a little company you may have heard of called WinZip. They offered him the job. It was going to be a bit of a commute, and the money was only slightly better, and we were talking about whether or not he should seriously think about it. In the end, I’m like “dude…it’s...