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Practical Experience As a Beginning Programmer?
LuckyLefty01 writes "I'm 21, going to college, and working part time doing odd jobs like math tutoring. In the past nine months or so, I've discovered and taken to programming (so far mostly C/C++/Obj-C). I am now looking seriously at something in this area as an eventual full time job. Since I don't have much scheduled this coming summer, it would be great to try to get a job of some sort at a tech-related company in order to get some practical experience in the field. Even if I don't have the background to get a job involving actual programming, I think that the knowledge of how such a company works would be valuable. Fortunately, I live in the SF Bay Area, so there should be plenty of companies around. I'm flexible about what I'm going to be doing, and very willing to learn just about anything anybody cares to teach me. If there's some (or even quite a bit of) boring grunt work involved, I can do that too. What type of job would benefit an aspiring but inexperienced programmer the most? What methods might I use to find such a job?"
Head on over to bugs.gnome.org and start by fixing the easy ones, then work from there. Once you are comfy, take a look at OpenOffice or Mozilla's bug tracker and see what kind of help they need. You'll be saving the world AND be able to put this on your resume. "Contributing developer to the open source GNOME desktop, OpenOffice, and Mozilla Firefox." It looks really nice on a resume... though you might want to leave the part about working as a truck mechanic off there. -ellie
but, at least from my own personal experience, its pretty late in the game to be looking for a summer job, esp. if you don't have very much experience. Not that you can't, but I would look into open source stuff and just your own personal computing needs to find stuff to work on. Many people will go on in detail about open source, so I'll just speak to the latter:
Do you have any monotonous tasks that you do on your computer that you think could be automated? Well then automate them! Even if it isn't very good, it will still familiarize you with the various languages and how computer programs work to solve various problems.
Monstar L
... will probably not involve C++ development.
There are a few reasons for that. The minor ones are that most C++ / ObjC projects are big enough that it's difficult to bring an experience programmer in to work on them for just a few weeks, let alone someone with no large project experience. Not impossible, by any means, but not something that a larger company is likely to do outside of a more formal (and longer term) sponsorship arrangement.
The big reasons are that the absolute _last_ thing you need either on your resume, or to enhance your skill set is a brief job coding. The basic coding is something that you should be picking up the basics of in college, rounding out a little with some personal coding (helping out with the countless open source projects out there, for instance) and won't really bring to fruition until you're doing it full time.
The skills you're less likely to pick up there, but which you can pick up in a shorter temporary project are things like QA, marketing, sales, system administration, maybe even customer support. So look at picking up a grunt work job in the field that's not directly touching code. QA and testing (for a real software company, not EA or anything in that field) is a gig you might well be able to pick up, and which would teach you more about good software design and good software project management in a painful 8 weeks than you'd learn in a year writing software. If you can do that in an early-stage startup, and see that business process too, at least from the sidelines, even better.
Heck, if you could wangle it, working as a gopher for one of the Sand Hill Rd VC firms would be one of the best introductions to a career in the software field, I think.
respectfully, you are not in a position to have a point of view that is worth much on this topic. If you're one of geek women, then you have a large pool of geek guys to work from. What is interesting is that you mentioned 1% that are female. So how else would expect those 99 out of 100 geek guys to feel who could not find that 1% of geek girls? It's not like women are a resource men can share with other men.
Here's some tips that will actually be useful. Men should dress for the kind of women they wish to attract. If you wear t-shirt and jeans to the bar (which is common attire in SF bay area), a man will attract one kind of woman. If he wears some trendier fashions he will attract another kind of woman. It helps to go to places where there are woman in a social setting, depending on the kind you are interested in. Bars, clubs, etc will have one set of women. But it is far easier to take some classes in cooking, art, etc to meet the more interesting females in a less intimidating setting.
Here's the biggest tips. Look a woman in the eyes when you talk to her and when she talks to you. Make sure you avoid actions that might be interpreted as disinterest because most women give up easily on the "first flirt".
OffTopic! I don't even get Funny, I get offtopic! Shhs... The kid is so digging for a job in the post, it should have been rejected from the getgo and never make it to the main stream. Must of been a slow news day. But I use slashdot appropriate humor to point out that the kid is pandering for job offers, and I get an offtopic... Slashdot is going down when it starts posing as the next "Monster." Maybe I should of included the all powerful "First Post!" but I figured I was above that... Guess not.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...