I got a non-technical post-graduate degree and now I'm a programmer. Only took a couple of years to get my first programming job. Here's how I did it.
First of all, I did as much programming as I could at my tech support jobs. Not all of it was company sponsored, but if I figured out something I could write that would help *me* do my job I would write it. I wrote all kinds of little things, and then I was able to truthfully add to my resume that I developed software.
I was also going to user group meetings for the language I was using most and meeting people there. I ended up getting my first job (and all subsequent jobs, actually) through people I met at those meetings. At least for the language, city, and time I happened to be in, the meetings were filled with people who knew about more work than they could take. And the recommendations you can get there are worth "2-5 years of experience" on a resume.
I'm currently helping my company's QA guy get some programming tasks so he can make the switch and give his job to some other poor CS grad. Is there anyone on the development team where you are that might help you out?
There's one more option: recruiters. I know they're not great, and the jobs you get through them aren't all perfect, but there are some recruiters who can help you market yourself without the exact "2-5 years of experience" someone's looking for.
One last thing: If you're any good at all you'll be way ahead of most people in this field. If you can get an interview, showing your abilities and desire to learn can be enough.
Good luck.
Re:Chapter 10 - Large Projects
on
Advanced Rails
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· Score: 1
Were you trying to imply that these facts had changed, or just that people had stopped talking about them?
Good question. What's changed, I guess, is that I stopped listening to those people. Yes, there's bad Perl out there that's totally opaque. But my experience has been that, for the most part, Perl code is no better and no worse than anything else you're likely to come across.
It all sounded reasonable, and you could find examples that supported the assertions, but the people saying all that were basically trolls, even if they were CTOs.
Re:Chapter 10 - Large Projects
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 1
yellowpages.com runs on Rails, and that's a large, enterprisey project.
All of 37signals' products are Rails sites, too, and they're handling data for plenty of enterprises.
There are a lot of "horror stories" precisely because they're horror-inducing. No one retells a story about how someone's website got built with the same number of uninteresting issues as usual.
When I was coming up, all I heard was that Perl was read-only, and that anyone with a large Perl codebase was in big trouble as soon as anyone who wrote any part of that code left the company, and that no one serious about long-term stability would ever even think about using Perl. And blah blah blah.
And anyway, if Rails was, at any given time, bad for large-scale projects, there would be plenty of people working to fix that.
Disclaimer: I work on enterprisey Rails projects, some of which are large.
Unfortunately what works for Radiohead and NIN isn't necessarily going to work for other musicians.
But that's the same for major label deals. They work okay-ish if you're Radiohead or NIN, but not further down the line. In fact, musicians are (as this Steve Albini essay implies) better off not signing to a major label, and following this new route instead.
The NY-Times bestseller list is based on books sold to distributors, not books sold to the public
Wrong! A bunch of the data for the NYT bestseller list comes from sold-to-the-public numbers from bookstores. My mom was a book promoter for a while, and discovering in advance that a bookstore would be counted in next week's list would make her day. She knew where to spend resources to try to crack the list.
He probably went out and purchased a single CD, ripped it, and (if he was enough of a jerk) returned it to the store as defective.
Albums and singles are frequently found on P2P networks before release. The real piracy starts somewhere between the final production and shipping. But, yeah, not ever through radio (internet or otherwise).
I know. That was a rude formulation. What I meant to say was "the kind of god you're playing devil's advocate for" so to speak.
Second, who here said anything about "4,000 years"?
Well, in a sense, you did: "He could have made it so that all scientific evidence and all possible human understanding would imply that the universe had always existed." 4,000 years is a placeholder for however old the universe REALLY is, compared to the evidence god keeps giving us.
Third, who, besides you, is claiming that god would "deceive"?
You are. Both in the above quote, and in a subsequent post when you said an all-good etc god could be "misleading". "Deceive" and "mislead" are on the same side of untruthful.
Fourth, I said you wouldn't be capable of understanding, but I never said you wouldn't want to know.
But don't you claim to understand when you say "it must necessarily be done that way for a good purpose"?
Look, if you're going to say this all-good etc god can be misleading (at worst!), then a rational man can only doubt him. If you're going to say that an all-good etc god could not be misleading, then a rational man is able to trust science and logic to show us the truth without dragging god into it.
And, if an all-good etc god wouldn't be misleading, why would we have to worry about getting the message wrong? Couldn't such a god craft a message so stupid and clear that even us lowly humans could understand it?
Once you accept the presence of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational being who you can't understand, can't trust, and doesn't provide you with any testable knowledge you cease being rational.
But let's pretend for a moment that your god exists and that I'm rational. Why wouldn't I want to know why god deceives us into thinking that the Earth is over 4,000 years old? Why wouldn't I want to discover if the same principles god uses for deception are allowable for my own use? Why wouldn't I want to discover more? I don't think a rational man should accept "Trust me" as good enough.
I know, I know... The "Trust me" comes from your all-knowing, blah, blah, blah god. But a rational man doubts.
Why misleading? What rational (remember, besides being all good and all powerful, this god is the paragon of rationality) reason would god have to be misleading, or even incomprehensible? Especially if we're special to god, and especially if god has supposedly clearly communicated other truths to us?
There's no room for argumentation; if you posit the existence of an all-powerful god, then it would be within that god's power to make the universe however he chose. He could have made it so that all scientific evidence and all possible human understanding would imply that the universe had always existed.
There is room for an argument if the all-powerful god you posit the existence of is also all good (which is what these people do). Would an all-good god be deceitful?
From the security page of the reCAPTCHA site: "if somebody writes a program that can read our distorted images, we can add more distortions in very little time"
If someone can write a program to solve the distorted images of OCR-unreadable words, don't you just hire that guy to do your OCR and get out of the CAPTCHA business?
I saw that interview and was so pleased to see Matthews suddenly at a loss for words. He was ready to go on an anti-CounterStrike tirade. I was surprised the suitemate was able to remain calm just answer that he never saw Cho playing video games, instead of--you know--calling out Matthews for his ignorant bullshit.
That's a ridiculous comparison. Cars have beneficial uses. Many, many uses which make the world a better place. Guns? Even close to automobiles in positive results from usage? Hardly.
Also, the CDC reports about 30,000 gun-related deaths per year. Also, more people drive or are passengers in a car than fire a gun. Also, the time spent by people around cars as drivers, passengers, or pedestrians nearby far far far far outweighs the time spent by people wielding or around other people wielding guns.
Don't try to confuse the facts with poor analogies. That's the road to truthiness.
FTA: "Were the model to be commercialized, it could be updated on a play-by-play basis, which fans could monitor to see how every play changes the outcome of a game. "I think some fans would think that's cool," Bukiet said."
How individual plays affect the outcome (or probable outcome) has been a well-worn subject of late in the blogs and discussion lists of baseball fans. And you don't need commercial products for answers. Retrosheet.org provides play-by-play data reaching back decades, from which I calculated how often given game-states have resulted in wins for the home team. Taking the win expectancies before and after an event tells you how important the event was. My Win Expectancy Finder is lives here.
Google isn't some public service that needs to be "fair." If consumers start to feel like google's self-promotion degrades the quality of the (free, bear in mind) service they provide, then they will stop using it.
But isn't this just one consumer feeling that Google's self-promotion is degrading the quality of the service they provide? Just because he co-founded Firefox doesn't mean he can't express his dissatisfaction.
The inverse square root is 1/(sqrt(x)), not x^2 (which is, I admit, the first thing I thought of, wondering why anyone would be so excited about a faster way of getting it).
Slashdot Mirror
I got a non-technical post-graduate degree and now I'm a programmer. Only took a couple of years to get my first programming job. Here's how I did it.
First of all, I did as much programming as I could at my tech support jobs. Not all of it was company sponsored, but if I figured out something I could write that would help *me* do my job I would write it. I wrote all kinds of little things, and then I was able to truthfully add to my resume that I developed software.
I was also going to user group meetings for the language I was using most and meeting people there. I ended up getting my first job (and all subsequent jobs, actually) through people I met at those meetings. At least for the language, city, and time I happened to be in, the meetings were filled with people who knew about more work than they could take. And the recommendations you can get there are worth "2-5 years of experience" on a resume.
I'm currently helping my company's QA guy get some programming tasks so he can make the switch and give his job to some other poor CS grad. Is there anyone on the development team where you are that might help you out?
There's one more option: recruiters. I know they're not great, and the jobs you get through them aren't all perfect, but there are some recruiters who can help you market yourself without the exact "2-5 years of experience" someone's looking for.
One last thing: If you're any good at all you'll be way ahead of most people in this field. If you can get an interview, showing your abilities and desire to learn can be enough.
Good luck.
Good question. What's changed, I guess, is that I stopped listening to those people. Yes, there's bad Perl out there that's totally opaque. But my experience has been that, for the most part, Perl code is no better and no worse than anything else you're likely to come across.
It all sounded reasonable, and you could find examples that supported the assertions, but the people saying all that were basically trolls, even if they were CTOs.
yellowpages.com runs on Rails, and that's a large, enterprisey project.
All of 37signals' products are Rails sites, too, and they're handling data for plenty of enterprises.
There are a lot of "horror stories" precisely because they're horror-inducing. No one retells a story about how someone's website got built with the same number of uninteresting issues as usual.
When I was coming up, all I heard was that Perl was read-only, and that anyone with a large Perl codebase was in big trouble as soon as anyone who wrote any part of that code left the company, and that no one serious about long-term stability would ever even think about using Perl. And blah blah blah.
And anyway, if Rails was, at any given time, bad for large-scale projects, there would be plenty of people working to fix that.
Disclaimer: I work on enterprisey Rails projects, some of which are large.
But that's the same for major label deals. They work okay-ish if you're Radiohead or NIN, but not further down the line. In fact, musicians are (as this Steve Albini essay implies) better off not signing to a major label, and following this new route instead.
The Star Wars Limited Edition DVDs include the original theatrical releases. The UPCs are 024542263739, 024543263838, and 024543263937.
Last time I went to buy hand soap for home, of the two dozen different brands and sub-brand products on the shelf, only TWO were not antibacterial.
Even if I want to be a good buy and not use antibacterial soap, I can't.
I'm sorry, please enlighten me. If there were two non-antibacterial soaps available, how come you can't use them?
The NY-Times bestseller list is based on books sold to distributors, not books sold to the public
Wrong! A bunch of the data for the NYT bestseller list comes from sold-to-the-public numbers from bookstores. My mom was a book promoter for a while, and discovering in advance that a bookstore would be counted in next week's list would make her day. She knew where to spend resources to try to crack the list.
He probably went out and purchased a single CD, ripped it, and (if he was enough of a jerk) returned it to the store as defective.
Albums and singles are frequently found on P2P networks before release. The real piracy starts somewhere between the final production and shipping. But, yeah, not ever through radio (internet or otherwise).
First, it's not "my" god.
I know. That was a rude formulation. What I meant to say was "the kind of god you're playing devil's advocate for" so to speak.
Second, who here said anything about "4,000 years"?
Well, in a sense, you did: "He could have made it so that all scientific evidence and all possible human understanding would imply that the universe had always existed." 4,000 years is a placeholder for however old the universe REALLY is, compared to the evidence god keeps giving us.
Third, who, besides you, is claiming that god would "deceive"?
You are. Both in the above quote, and in a subsequent post when you said an all-good etc god could be "misleading". "Deceive" and "mislead" are on the same side of untruthful.
Fourth, I said you wouldn't be capable of understanding, but I never said you wouldn't want to know.
But don't you claim to understand when you say "it must necessarily be done that way for a good purpose"?
Look, if you're going to say this all-good etc god can be misleading (at worst!), then a rational man can only doubt him. If you're going to say that an all-good etc god could not be misleading, then a rational man is able to trust science and logic to show us the truth without dragging god into it.
And, if an all-good etc god wouldn't be misleading, why would we have to worry about getting the message wrong? Couldn't such a god craft a message so stupid and clear that even us lowly humans could understand it?
Once you accept the presence of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational being who you can't understand, can't trust, and doesn't provide you with any testable knowledge you cease being rational.
But let's pretend for a moment that your god exists and that I'm rational. Why wouldn't I want to know why god deceives us into thinking that the Earth is over 4,000 years old? Why wouldn't I want to discover if the same principles god uses for deception are allowable for my own use? Why wouldn't I want to discover more? I don't think a rational man should accept "Trust me" as good enough.
I know, I know... The "Trust me" comes from your all-knowing, blah, blah, blah god. But a rational man doubts.
What rational man would question the motives of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational god?
Every last one of them.
Why misleading? What rational (remember, besides being all good and all powerful, this god is the paragon of rationality) reason would god have to be misleading, or even incomprehensible? Especially if we're special to god, and especially if god has supposedly clearly communicated other truths to us?
There's no room for argumentation; if you posit the existence of an all-powerful god, then it would be within that god's power to make the universe however he chose. He could have made it so that all scientific evidence and all possible human understanding would imply that the universe had always existed.
There is room for an argument if the all-powerful god you posit the existence of is also all good (which is what these people do). Would an all-good god be deceitful?
From the security page of the reCAPTCHA site: "if somebody writes a program that can read our distorted images, we can add more distortions in very little time"
If someone can write a program to solve the distorted images of OCR-unreadable words, don't you just hire that guy to do your OCR and get out of the CAPTCHA business?
Wow. You've skipped from not reading TFA, right over not reading the summary, straight to not even really reading the headline!
I saw that interview and was so pleased to see Matthews suddenly at a loss for words. He was ready to go on an anti-CounterStrike tirade. I was surprised the suitemate was able to remain calm just answer that he never saw Cho playing video games, instead of--you know--calling out Matthews for his ignorant bullshit.
But you don't hear anyone wanting to ban cars.
That's a ridiculous comparison. Cars have beneficial uses. Many, many uses which make the world a better place. Guns? Even close to automobiles in positive results from usage? Hardly.
Also, the CDC reports about 30,000 gun-related deaths per year. Also, more people drive or are passengers in a car than fire a gun. Also, the time spent by people around cars as drivers, passengers, or pedestrians nearby far far far far outweighs the time spent by people wielding or around other people wielding guns.
Don't try to confuse the facts with poor analogies. That's the road to truthiness.
...as if millions of chairs suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Forgive me for being skeptical of someone who calls carbon dioxide "C02" instead of "CO2"
FTA: "Were the model to be commercialized, it could be updated on a play-by-play basis, which fans could monitor to see how every play changes the outcome of a game. "I think some fans would think that's cool," Bukiet said."
How individual plays affect the outcome (or probable outcome) has been a well-worn subject of late in the blogs and discussion lists of baseball fans. And you don't need commercial products for answers. Retrosheet.org provides play-by-play data reaching back decades, from which I calculated how often given game-states have resulted in wins for the home team. Taking the win expectancies before and after an event tells you how important the event was. My Win Expectancy Finder is lives here.
I imagine this guy's using Markov chains, too.
My tests were conducted on an AMD Athlon(TM) 64 3500+ processor, with 1 GB of RAM.
It's right there under the large "Benchmark Environment" heading.
"You may like the Wii or the 360 more, but only the PS3 is gaining official Linux support, written by Sony engineers."
I've seen the work of Sony engineers, and I don't like it.
Not so fast. Actual linguists have looked at the data with better tools and are highly skeptical of the missing "a". See, for example, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/003632.html
The inverse square root is 1/(sqrt(x)), not x^2 (which is, I admit, the first thing I thought of, wondering why anyone would be so excited about a faster way of getting it).