I had a glance round our weekly team meeting today. 30 people, 29 of them male. The female was a work experience student. (This is in Australia)
In my consulting company we probably are 90% male. I don't think this is a reflection of our hiring policies, I think it's a reflection of what degrees high school students are choosing. IT is a more nerdy and male dominated field.
<flamebait>Anyway, women are more creative and interesting that males and know better than to do an IT degree. I say good on em. </flamebait>
I hear it all the time "We want someone young, energetic" - because old people are not worth the effort.
Accent can be a problem, but I don't think that this is in any way racist. If you can't understand the person because of their accent, it's going to be tough working with them. It doesn't matter what country they come from.
If only more people in the world were like you, sir.
The only book that I have read is titled "Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel. (http://www.caseforacreator.com/home.php). What I thought good about this book is that he references lots of other books - may be a good starting point.
(I also agree with a lot of the parents that the original 'story' is a pathetic attempt at flame-baiting. Slashdot is getting pathetic and showing it's bias - final nail in the coffin of ID.. give me a break )
1. I reckon two screens is just a complete waste of time. You can alt-tab (or whatever) quicker than you can move your neck and eyes across.
2. Learn a scripting language, then a programming language. Automate your repetitive tasks. Geez does someone even need to explain this?
3. Ditch the mouse - or at least attempt to. Learn keyboard shortcuts for everything. This will save you a LOT of time! Well worth the effort involved.
4. Learn to delegate and prioritise your work.
5. Learn to ignore things (and people) that waste your time.
Get a development database, a testing database and production database. Yes, you need all three.
Write a few docs explaining each system. Make these are detailed as you possibly can. (This will save you weeks in the long term)
Use software revision control. CVS, VSS, whatever, use one.
Use a bug tracker. BugZilla, Jira, CityDesk, whatever, use one.
Use whatever coding standards the language reckons you should. If java, use sun's standards. If microsoft, use their standards.
Write automated unit tests. I don't care if you're not an agile or XP developer, write unit tests. Check out Junit, or Nunit, or just write your own.
Setup some code so that you can check out ALL code from the source code repository and compile it by ONE COMMAND. Eg, "make" or "ant" or "maven" or whatever. This will take time but is worth it.
Have a naming standard for database tables. This will make your life SOOOO much easier.
Read thedailywtf.com and don't do anything that is posted there.
Write specs for your new developers. Please write specs for your new developers. Don't just say to them 'fix this up'.
Make sure code isn't hard-coded to a particular directory. Everyone does this. Fix it. (Might be part of step 7)
Create your own standard config files.
Have code reviewed by peers. Don't be a bastard but be nice when picking on people's code.
As mentioned, comment your code but use the language standard. Java - javadocs, Perl - perldocs, etc. These are cool, but don't get too carried away. Nothing can replace a good spec.
Ignore what most people say on Slashdot. (Except for me, of course).
That'll keep you busy for a couple of months! Doing thiswill make you well on the way to having a pretty high level of coding quality. Most companies don't do all of them. Good luck.
Just use.NET's XML serialisation on a DataSet to use an offline file a high availability server which has a RAID-5 array. Ok... so that's not really high availability, simple or really sensible but it would be a bit of fun.
How about you have a few Access.mdb files (created using Jet, it's free) updated asynchronously using a few COM objects in Transaction Server? Well, it wouldn't work but the idea is pretty cool. Well actually it isn't really but you know.
Or just write down all of your data, photocopy it and give the copy to your Mum (that's Mom, to all you yanks.. (why are you called "yanks"?)). And let's face it, your Mum, oops sorry Mom, is always itching for your phone call. Maybe you should call her more often?
Bah. Real programmers write their own. That's what's running on my site (don't give me any slashdot crap about ASP, it's crap but it works). Only took a few hours but it's configurable to the EXTREME!
Whoever setup the web server should be held responsible and embarassed in front of his parents. The parents of the students should also vote on whatever method they think is most appropriate.
As an engineer, this is way cool.
However as a guitarist - have you noticed just how mechanical the whole thing sounds? Here's why:
String muting - a big problem here. When playing guitar you can mute the strings that you're not playing with either your left or right hand. Notice how all of the strings "ring out" after playing a note? A key change on this thing would not sound good.
Bending - half the fun of playing the guitar is that you can bend notes. Bending and sliding is what can make a guitar 'sing' - similar to a voice.
Tremolo - to make your playing have any sense of feeling you need to be able to tremolo a note. That means slightly varying the pitch of it. This can be done in a few different ways - none that are possible here.
Strumming - ask it to strum a chord. It can't. Individual picks for each string is kind of cool, but won't sound any good when playing any songs recorded in the past 80 years.
Harmonics - can it play a one?
String selection - a good guitarist will pick particular strings for playing a particular note. These sound completely different because of a few reasons - an A on the bottom E string (fifth fret) compared with playing an A on the A string (open) will have a very different timbre. Doesn't look like that's possible here.
Range - the guitar actually has a very large range compared to other instruments. Doesn't look like you can get past the 5th fret here.
Legato, hammerons and pulloffs - can it 'flutter' between two notes?
All of these things are particular to an acoustic guitar. As for trying to duplicate an electric guitar with distortion - that would be freaking cool but very hard.
They've got it the wrong way around. Instead of flagging all dodgy ISP's, why don't we have a database of all trusted ISP's that are (relatively) secure? Of course someone needs to define "secure", and some kind of standards organisation can do that (basically just have the latest patches and no known vulnerabilities). This way when you receive email your client can check what server it came from, and split it up from dodgy / ok.
To avoid keystroke loggers, is it possible for Firefox to contain its own keyboard handler? I don't know if this is possible in windows or not, I remember doing this back in ms-dos days. Just directly override the interrupt and read from the port.
So, what would be cool, is if firefox had a "secure keyboard" toggle, which when turned on, disables the OS's keyboard handler and turns on its own. Is this feasible?
Mod this parent up as most slashdotters don't seem to know what MQ'ing is.
You can also have a publish/subscribe method, where one application can "publish" a message onto a queue, and any other app can "subscribe" to this queue and get the message. Useful for something like stock market prices (that constantly change) that lots of apps might rely on.
At an old place of work we used SonicMQ for our messaging.
Now to be fair, the broker itself was quite stable, and if you were just using java, I assume that everything would be ok. However we were using a bunch of different languages (legacy systems) and some of the adapters for those languages were a joke.
It became our developer in-joke. "Why did the system go down today? Sonic". Memory leaks, random crashing, threading problems, you name it. Caused us months of bug fixing. I'm sure (hope) that things have come a long way since then.
An open source messaging tool (that worked properly and had load balancing, etc) would be a great thing.
I agree, this manifesto is too closed-minded. Saying "you are not going to be the next microsoft/SAP because you are too late" is completely wrong. Let's see how google goes in another 5 years.
No-one says it is going to be easy, but with a bit of imagination anything can happen. Who the hell would have thought five years ago that google could beat yahoo et al? (Of course the day they write an OS that is better than XP, I'll eat my hat (luckily I don't have any))
Exactly. Why the hell did you pay the company without testing the damn thing first? Like you said:
>and will be stuck with a product that is useless
If it's useless, and you paid them for it, whose fault is that? Who doesn't buy something without testing it out first? Especially software! Out of all people you should know that there are always bugs! And you didn't get the source code? Don't mean to troll but I hope that you have learnt something from this.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that you are extremely lucky, sir!
I had a glance round our weekly team meeting today. 30 people, 29 of them male. The female was a work experience student. (This is in Australia)
In my consulting company we probably are 90% male. I don't think this is a reflection of our hiring policies, I think it's a reflection of what degrees high school students are choosing. IT is a more nerdy and male dominated field.
<flamebait>Anyway, women are more creative and interesting that males and know better than to do an IT degree. I say good on em. </flamebait>
Age is a bigger issue.
I hear it all the time "We want someone young, energetic" - because old people are not worth the effort.
Accent can be a problem, but I don't think that this is in any way racist. If you can't understand the person because of their accent, it's going to be tough working with them. It doesn't matter what country they come from.
If only more people in the world were like you, sir.
The only book that I have read is titled "Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel. (http://www.caseforacreator.com/home.php). What I thought good about this book is that he references lots of other books - may be a good starting point.
(I also agree with a lot of the parents that the original 'story' is a pathetic attempt at flame-baiting. Slashdot is getting pathetic and showing it's bias - final nail in the coffin of ID.. give me a break )
1. I reckon two screens is just a complete waste of time. You can alt-tab (or whatever) quicker than you can move your neck and eyes across.
2. Learn a scripting language, then a programming language. Automate your repetitive tasks. Geez does someone even need to explain this?
3. Ditch the mouse - or at least attempt to. Learn keyboard shortcuts for everything. This will save you a LOT of time! Well worth the effort involved.
4. Learn to delegate and prioritise your work.
5. Learn to ignore things (and people) that waste your time.
- Get a development database, a testing database and production database. Yes, you need all three.
- Write a few docs explaining each system. Make these are detailed as you possibly can. (This will save you weeks in the long term)
- Use software revision control. CVS, VSS, whatever, use one.
- Use a bug tracker. BugZilla, Jira, CityDesk, whatever, use one.
- Use whatever coding standards the language reckons you should. If java, use sun's standards. If microsoft, use their standards.
- Write automated unit tests. I don't care if you're not an agile or XP developer, write unit tests. Check out Junit, or Nunit, or just write your own.
- Setup some code so that you can check out ALL code from the source code repository and compile it by ONE COMMAND. Eg, "make" or "ant" or "maven" or whatever. This will take time but is worth it.
- Have a naming standard for database tables. This will make your life SOOOO much easier.
- Read thedailywtf.com and don't do anything that is posted there.
- Write specs for your new developers. Please write specs for your new developers. Don't just say to them 'fix this up'.
- Make sure code isn't hard-coded to a particular directory. Everyone does this. Fix it. (Might be part of step 7)
- Create your own standard config files.
- Have code reviewed by peers. Don't be a bastard but be nice when picking on people's code.
- As mentioned, comment your code but use the language standard. Java - javadocs, Perl - perldocs, etc. These are cool, but don't get too carried away. Nothing can replace a good spec.
- Ignore what most people say on Slashdot. (Except for me, of course).
That'll keep you busy for a couple of months! Doing thiswill make you well on the way to having a pretty high level of coding quality. Most companies don't do all of them. Good luck.Just use .NET's XML serialisation on a DataSet to use an offline file a high availability server which has a RAID-5 array. Ok... so that's not really high availability, simple or really sensible but it would be a bit of fun.
.mdb files (created using Jet, it's free) updated asynchronously using a few COM objects in Transaction Server? Well, it wouldn't work but the idea is pretty cool. Well actually it isn't really but you know.
How about you have a few Access
Or just write down all of your data, photocopy it and give the copy to your Mum (that's Mom, to all you yanks.. (why are you called "yanks"?)). And let's face it, your Mum, oops sorry Mom, is always itching for your phone call. Maybe you should call her more often?
It's ok, I think I'm hilarious but know I'm not.
Bah. Real programmers write their own. That's what's running on my site (don't give me any slashdot crap about ASP, it's crap but it works). Only took a few hours but it's configurable to the EXTREME!
It also comes at the same time that the number of Chinese people living in extreme poverty rose by 800,000 last year.
Can someone please explain to me why the hell I should care?
Whoever setup the web server should be held responsible and embarassed in front of his parents. The parents of the students should also vote on whatever method they think is most appropriate.
- String muting - a big problem here. When playing guitar you can mute the strings that you're not playing with either your left or right hand. Notice how all of the strings "ring out" after playing a note? A key change on this thing would not sound good.
- Bending - half the fun of playing the guitar is that you can bend notes. Bending and sliding is what can make a guitar 'sing' - similar to a voice.
- Tremolo - to make your playing have any sense of feeling you need to be able to tremolo a note. That means slightly varying the pitch of it. This can be done in a few different ways - none that are possible here.
- Strumming - ask it to strum a chord. It can't. Individual picks for each string is kind of cool, but won't sound any good when playing any songs recorded in the past 80 years.
- Harmonics - can it play a one?
- String selection - a good guitarist will pick particular strings for playing a particular note. These sound completely different because of a few reasons - an A on the bottom E string (fifth fret) compared with playing an A on the A string (open) will have a very different timbre. Doesn't look like that's possible here.
- Range - the guitar actually has a very large range compared to other instruments. Doesn't look like you can get past the 5th fret here.
- Legato, hammerons and pulloffs - can it 'flutter' between two notes?
All of these things are particular to an acoustic guitar. As for trying to duplicate an electric guitar with distortion - that would be freaking cool but very hard.How hard can it be? Let me at it!
Does this mean I can run NetHack on my new DVD player?
Could you just take a really high resolution photograph of it? Doesn't everyone have different handwriting? Or are all of them meant to look the same?
They've got it the wrong way around. Instead of flagging all dodgy ISP's, why don't we have a database of all trusted ISP's that are (relatively) secure? Of course someone needs to define "secure", and some kind of standards organisation can do that (basically just have the latest patches and no known vulnerabilities). This way when you receive email your client can check what server it came from, and split it up from dodgy / ok.
Here's a question for you;
To avoid keystroke loggers, is it possible for Firefox to contain its own keyboard handler? I don't know if this is possible in windows or not, I remember doing this back in ms-dos days. Just directly override the interrupt and read from the port.
So, what would be cool, is if firefox had a "secure keyboard" toggle, which when turned on, disables the OS's keyboard handler and turns on its own. Is this feasible?
>this is America
No it's frigging not. I'm not in America.
Please repeat after me: "Other countries than America exist."
It's called fdisk isn't it?
Get either an MCP, Sun Java certification, or perhaps IBM's linux certification. Proof that you know what you're doing, and lots of jobs ask for them.
Mod this parent up as most slashdotters don't seem to know what MQ'ing is.
You can also have a publish/subscribe method, where one application can "publish" a message onto a queue, and any other app can "subscribe" to this queue and get the message. Useful for something like stock market prices (that constantly change) that lots of apps might rely on.
Isn't MQ meant for messages? (Hence the name?) Not for large files? It sounds like you're right, you should be using FTP.
At an old place of work we used SonicMQ for our messaging.
Now to be fair, the broker itself was quite stable, and if you were just using java, I assume that everything would be ok. However we were using a bunch of different languages (legacy systems) and some of the adapters for those languages were a joke.
It became our developer in-joke. "Why did the system go down today? Sonic". Memory leaks, random crashing, threading problems, you name it. Caused us months of bug fixing. I'm sure (hope) that things have come a long way since then.
An open source messaging tool (that worked properly and had load balancing, etc) would be a great thing.
I agree, this manifesto is too closed-minded. Saying "you are not going to be the next microsoft/SAP because you are too late" is completely wrong. Let's see how google goes in another 5 years.
No-one says it is going to be easy, but with a bit of imagination anything can happen. Who the hell would have thought five years ago that google could beat yahoo et al? (Of course the day they write an OS that is better than XP, I'll eat my hat (luckily I don't have any))
Exactly. Why the hell did you pay the company without testing the damn thing first? Like you said:
>and will be stuck with a product that is useless
If it's useless, and you paid them for it, whose fault is that? Who doesn't buy something without testing it out first? Especially software! Out of all people you should know that there are always bugs! And you didn't get the source code? Don't mean to troll but I hope that you have learnt something from this.
This means that the phrase "I got a virus from my printer" could actually be correct.