Point to the strength of your work. Bring a portfolio of things you can show off. Discuss what you've done well. Have a good resume, talking about how you've been a paragon of postive change, productivity. Think about what you do best, and make a bullet point list of those things. For each of those items on that list, have and practice 1 or 2 little stories that tell about how great you are. Be ready to wheel those stories out. (Same idea works well in sales.) It's important to have a collection of mini-stories ready.
References. References don't need to be your former boss. They can also be peers, customers, or vendors. Think about people who know that you've really done the things on your list of things you do well, and see if they will serve as a reference. A reference doesn't have to know everything about you, they just need to be able to back up and verify at least one story that you tell during the interview. When you provide your reference list, include a brief one-sentence summary of the story this reference can verify.
Take the high road. Point to what you do well, and leave it at that. Alternatively, if pressed, you can tell your prospective employer the truth, but try to stay positive. Let them know that you stayed up front and honest through your communications, and tried very hard to escalate things to management before it got out of hand, but they weren't in the mood to listen.
Say what you will about it, but it works really well. It's a fast easy way to develop AJAX pages: Visual Studio with Atlas. Of course, it's how Lord Vader would develop software, but it's still good stuff.
Is SL intended to sustain businesses? AFAIK you can't make a living in IRC or most computer games either, but I don't consider that to be a problem.
SL is different from these other games and IRC. The content (fun things to do and see) in SL comes from individuals, and the best content came from people who did the work with the intent to sell it. SL is in fact intended to sustain business. Micro-businesses in most cases, but businesses nonetheless. A huge chunk of the content in SL was created for sale.
I'm calling the software open source, not the use. This particular software, though, frees other people's creations in a way that their owners didn't intend. That's also known as stealing.
since when has "open source development" meant "making unauthorized copies"?
Generally those two things are unrelated. In this case, though, open source development is what is fueling the unauthorized copies. The copy bot in this case is built on the open source project libsecondlife, and the copy bot itself is open source and part of that project.
but there's still no shortage of content, because the bots are building stuff.
Actually that's not exactly what the situation is. One of the biggest industries in SL was clothing. People were buying new outfits all the time, and there was a thriving fashion industry. Most of the people making new clothes are stopping because of all the turmoil and rampant copying. Sure, there's no shortage of clothes. But there will be far fewer people making new and interesting clothes.
I'm a developer of scripted animals in SL, the number 1 developer, depending on how you count such things. I clear a a few hundred dollars profit every month after paying for my property. This copybot thing hasn't hit me too hard directly because the copybot doesn't copy scripts, only models. But it is hitting me hard in the sense that most of the content creators in SL are closing shop, which closes down the whole world as we knew it.
I get the sense that this will be remembered as an important battle in open vs. closed development models.
We have content creators that were thriving because of DRM-- the content creators wouldn't have put the same kind of time and effort into their creations if they couldn't be protected. And we have all that business coming to an abrupt close because of open source development.
I'm not saying open source is bad, or that DRM is good. I'm just saying that this is bringing to forefront the fact that people are going to need to change in the future how they think about work and ownership.
Second life is one of the most shallow, materialistic communities I've ever experienced.
There are lots of sub-communities. They're not all materialistic (is virtual materialism really materialism?) Certainly there's a big contengent of preening avatar appearance whores running around. But there's tons of other people doing tons of other things, too. Look at boat racing, miniature golf, or investigate becomming a dragon for glimpses of less self-absorbed community.
isn't one of the pleasures of the game supposed to be creating an Avatar for yourself? It was certainly the most-fun element of City of Heroes. The idea of paying somebody $3 to create a hero for me in that game would seem like utter insanity. How is Second Life different?
I felt the same way you describe when I started SL, but feel totally different now. Here's why.
For weeks when I first started I never bought anything. I built and scriped everything I needed. It was a matter of principle, a matter of pride. I wouldn't dream of buying an avatar, not when I can make my own. I wouldn't dream of buying someone's car, because it's more fun to make my own.
Then I started selling what I made. I started being very successful selling what I made. Then one day someone wanted me to go to a wedding. I needed to look my best at this wedding. Technically I could spend a few hours working on a tuxedo, but my home-made tuxedo won't look at good as a top-notch one made my a specialist tuxedo maker. (Similarly, if that tuxedo guy wants an animated robot-loaded cannon or animated animal, there's no way he can compete with what I make.) So I could save L$500 and make a tuxedo myself over several hours. Or, I could buy a tuxedo for L$500, and spend those several hours doing work that I specialize in that will earn me far more than L$500.
So while the fun is in making things, there's just not enough hours in the day to make everything. And a single person isn't going to be able to make the best of everything.
The fun is making things, for some people. For other people, the fun is in entertaining guests, or cybersex, or gambling, or whatever.
The business model only works if you have a lot of people playing Second Life who only want to be consumers... and what could possibly be the draw of the game for them? If they want to build a social network, they can make a MySpace page.
There are a lot of people playing SL who are primarily consumers. More than content creators, in fact. Linden's CEO estimates about 75% of the players are primarily consumers. As for the comparison to MySpace: there's something special about having a virtual presence, an avatar, when talking with people. In SL you choose to be at a particlar location, with certain people. That presence makes a difference. As compared to Zwinky and Ragnarok, the possibilities of what you might do or see when socializing are far broader in SL. The user-created content allows for ultra-broad flexibility in self expression.
For example, you're never going to see someone burn themselves at the stake in Ragnarok, or dressed as undead being followed by a train of zombies in Zwinky.
- Unoti Quonset, the #1 scripter of animated animals in SL
I guess people need to ask themselves if the are in love with this programming stuff or just doing it for a paycheck.
Perhaps so. The topic at hand was how to be on top of your game. If you want to be on top of your game, you've got to have a passion for it. If you're just doing it for a paycheck, you don't really care about being on top of your game. So that's a whole other topic different from how to be among the best.
Generally highly successful people have a passion for excellence in what they do. And that's not true just with computer people. It's true for artists, musicians, car mechanics, carpenters, heck-- you name it. The very best love doing a good job. It's not so crazy to mess with it in your off time. How many house builders mess around making furniture or something in their garage on the weekends?
Programming isn't a normal hobby. But it beats the hell out of the typical activity, which is to watch TV for 30% of their waking hours and drink yourself silly 4 times a week.
But the topic at hand was how to be among the best, and you have to love it to do it.
In 1990, if you didn't use waterfall, you were called a cowboy hacker (that was generally a bad term in the software development industry then). It was revolutionary at the time.
Lots of people coded iteratively, hell, most successful developers did. But in the business world it was really frowned upon. Successful programmers pretended that they were doing waterfall when they really weren't. Programmers routinely made huge design documents (often after the code was mostly done) to appease their bosses.
That's the 90's. It was worse in the 80's. I didn't code professionally in the 70's, so I can't tell you about that, but I bet it was worse still.
Yeah, I feel comfortable in calling it revolutionary.
I totally agree. There's an unavoidable flamewar about to start here, but the.Net framework is fantastic. In my world, it's misguided to even want to be the best Java developer instead of the best.NET developer. Today and for the foreseable future, you'll be able to get more top quality work with.NET than with Java.
And aside from the evil overtones, it's a fantastic language. Come to the dark side.
----
Besides, Darth Vader can kill people across the galaxies on a viewscreen with a motion of his hand. What does Obie Wan get? He's a blue glowie, and he can whisper "use the force." Big deal.
First, you need to read a lot. Dr Dobbs, MSDN, developer blogs, books. To separate fad from rad, I recommend you use your own common sense.
For example, a few years back I worked hard to learn and understand the Unified Process. There were a lot of great ideas in there, but I felt it was too heavyweight and over the top for what I was doing. But I did feel it had brilliant ideas and revolutionary concepts. So I took what I thought were the most practical ideas and used them. The most important ideas I took were things like 1) throwing out the waterfall approach and developing iteratively, testing and "releasing" after each iteration, 2) identifying the biggest show-stopper risks up front and doing research to make them not so scary, 3) getting the customer/end user involved up front and through the whole process. A lot of people might shoot me for saying this, but it turns out that the Unified Process was pretty much a fad, and those key concepts turn out to be the foundation for "Agile Development" and "Extreme Programming."
The point is, read and study anything that interests you, and decide for yourself what's useful.
Succeed
Second, you need to do stuff to get success stories you can tell when you're interviewing or selling yourself to your current employer. A lot of book knowledge doesn't do diddley if you don't put things in the done basket. Ever see people at work with dozens of spiffy certifications that can't code their way out of a paper bag? Don't be like that. Do lots of stuff and do it successfully.
I recommend you work on anything you have some passion for, even if it's not directly work related. For example, I did a lot of 3D programming when I was working as an Oracle PL/SQL developer. Totally unrelated to work. But I honed my OO skills, learned OpenGL and DirectX, learned a lot about 3D math. Although it took a while to pay off, all of it did eventually pay off. Knowledge of C++ helped me answer tricky STL interview questions, and I later got a job with a company that makes interactive 3D training software for jet mechanics-- way cooler than Oracle. And even though this wasn't work-related, I was able to include that work in my list of success stories I could tell potential employers and other people making decisions about me.
So do whatever you have a passion for, and do it successfully and to completion.
Would like to clear up some bad misinformation there.
what are you talking about? second life is simply a very good way of getting people to shell out money for absolutely nothing. Paying upwaards of $1000+ dollars for a chunk of virtual space to build ($$$ to build, oh and to upload it costs $$$ matter of fact anything but wandsering around like a bump costs $$$ in second life.)
You can pay $1000+ dollars for a massive chunk of property-- an entire island big enough to house like 80 people. A starter piece of land costs a few dollars.
As to it costing money to do anything, that's not true either. I played hard for weeks creating things before I ever payed a single real dollar.
There is an advantage to second life.... Less kiddies and trolls because you have to link your credit card or paypal account to it.
Actually you don't have to link a credit card. You need either a credit card or a cell phone. But you're right about one thing-- it does scare away trolls like yourself, and that's good.
That's an interesting idea. If I were to try this, then I'd be showing my super secure password to 20 strangers every week. I suppose whether that is more secure is less secure than posting it on a monitor at work depends on the environment.
I wonder if it'd be possible to write a bot that reads slashdot articles, gets involved in flame wars on forum posts, and manages to get modded up to excellent karma...
These look about like conversations from chat bots in the 1980's. In the 80's I would have told you that AI in the year 2006 would be far beyond this stuff.
But now, I'm beginning to think that it'll never advance much beyond this.
This was the first thing I thought of as well. A Wiki is invaluable, even in a one-man shop. IT's great because you can use it for publishing documentation to your users, and they can even help improve documentation. The built-in version control features of a Wiki will be a huge help.
Another great tool is Big Brother.
You complain that MS is forcing you to recompile and retest the code, and you spank Microsoft for this atrocity. Then you go on to suggest that a good alternative is to rewrite the entire application in another platform.
The effort to recompile and retest under 2.0 is trivial to accomplish and a very small risk compared to the monstrous undertaking of completely re-writing the entire application.
If you didn't sound so level headed, I'd think your comments were motivated by something other than reason.
Slashdot Mirror
References. References don't need to be your former boss. They can also be peers, customers, or vendors. Think about people who know that you've really done the things on your list of things you do well, and see if they will serve as a reference. A reference doesn't have to know everything about you, they just need to be able to back up and verify at least one story that you tell during the interview. When you provide your reference list, include a brief one-sentence summary of the story this reference can verify.
Take the high road. Point to what you do well, and leave it at that. Alternatively, if pressed, you can tell your prospective employer the truth, but try to stay positive. Let them know that you stayed up front and honest through your communications, and tried very hard to escalate things to management before it got out of hand, but they weren't in the mood to listen.
Then go check it out! It's free.
Say what you will about it, but it works really well. It's a fast easy way to develop AJAX pages: Visual Studio with Atlas. Of course, it's how Lord Vader would develop software, but it's still good stuff.
Clearly we need to get some tough mother forkin programmers on this...
SL is different from these other games and IRC. The content (fun things to do and see) in SL comes from individuals, and the best content came from people who did the work with the intent to sell it. SL is in fact intended to sustain business. Micro-businesses in most cases, but businesses nonetheless. A huge chunk of the content in SL was created for sale.
Generally those two things are unrelated. In this case, though, open source development is what is fueling the unauthorized copies. The copy bot in this case is built on the open source project libsecondlife, and the copy bot itself is open source and part of that project.
Actually that's not exactly what the situation is. One of the biggest industries in SL was clothing. People were buying new outfits all the time, and there was a thriving fashion industry. Most of the people making new clothes are stopping because of all the turmoil and rampant copying. Sure, there's no shortage of clothes. But there will be far fewer people making new and interesting clothes.
I get the sense that this will be remembered as an important battle in open vs. closed development models.
We have content creators that were thriving because of DRM-- the content creators wouldn't have put the same kind of time and effort into their creations if they couldn't be protected. And we have all that business coming to an abrupt close because of open source development.
I'm not saying open source is bad, or that DRM is good. I'm just saying that this is bringing to forefront the fact that people are going to need to change in the future how they think about work and ownership.
Download the Microsoft XNA framework and build a game!
There are lots of sub-communities. They're not all materialistic (is virtual materialism really materialism?) Certainly there's a big contengent of preening avatar appearance whores running around. But there's tons of other people doing tons of other things, too. Look at boat racing, miniature golf, or investigate becomming a dragon for glimpses of less self-absorbed community.
I felt the same way you describe when I started SL, but feel totally different now. Here's why.
For weeks when I first started I never bought anything. I built and scriped everything I needed. It was a matter of principle, a matter of pride. I wouldn't dream of buying an avatar, not when I can make my own. I wouldn't dream of buying someone's car, because it's more fun to make my own.
Then I started selling what I made. I started being very successful selling what I made. Then one day someone wanted me to go to a wedding. I needed to look my best at this wedding. Technically I could spend a few hours working on a tuxedo, but my home-made tuxedo won't look at good as a top-notch one made my a specialist tuxedo maker. (Similarly, if that tuxedo guy wants an animated robot-loaded cannon or animated animal, there's no way he can compete with what I make.) So I could save L$500 and make a tuxedo myself over several hours. Or, I could buy a tuxedo for L$500, and spend those several hours doing work that I specialize in that will earn me far more than L$500.
So while the fun is in making things, there's just not enough hours in the day to make everything. And a single person isn't going to be able to make the best of everything.
The fun is making things, for some people. For other people, the fun is in entertaining guests, or cybersex, or gambling, or whatever.
The business model only works if you have a lot of people playing Second Life who only want to be consumers... and what could possibly be the draw of the game for them? If they want to build a social network, they can make a MySpace page.
There are a lot of people playing SL who are primarily consumers. More than content creators, in fact. Linden's CEO estimates about 75% of the players are primarily consumers. As for the comparison to MySpace: there's something special about having a virtual presence, an avatar, when talking with people. In SL you choose to be at a particlar location, with certain people. That presence makes a difference. As compared to Zwinky and Ragnarok, the possibilities of what you might do or see when socializing are far broader in SL. The user-created content allows for ultra-broad flexibility in self expression.
For example, you're never going to see someone burn themselves at the stake in Ragnarok, or dressed as undead being followed by a train of zombies in Zwinky.
- Unoti Quonset, the #1 scripter of animated animals in SL
Perhaps so. The topic at hand was how to be on top of your game. If you want to be on top of your game, you've got to have a passion for it. If you're just doing it for a paycheck, you don't really care about being on top of your game. So that's a whole other topic different from how to be among the best.
Generally highly successful people have a passion for excellence in what they do. And that's not true just with computer people. It's true for artists, musicians, car mechanics, carpenters, heck-- you name it. The very best love doing a good job. It's not so crazy to mess with it in your off time. How many house builders mess around making furniture or something in their garage on the weekends?
Programming isn't a normal hobby. But it beats the hell out of the typical activity, which is to watch TV for 30% of their waking hours and drink yourself silly 4 times a week.
But the topic at hand was how to be among the best, and you have to love it to do it.
Sequence diagrams are cool. I don't like use case diagrams much, but I do use a sequence diagram at least once a year.
Lots of people coded iteratively, hell, most successful developers did. But in the business world it was really frowned upon. Successful programmers pretended that they were doing waterfall when they really weren't. Programmers routinely made huge design documents (often after the code was mostly done) to appease their bosses.
That's the 90's. It was worse in the 80's. I didn't code professionally in the 70's, so I can't tell you about that, but I bet it was worse still.
Yeah, I feel comfortable in calling it revolutionary.
And aside from the evil overtones, it's a fantastic language. Come to the dark side.
----
Besides, Darth Vader can kill people across the galaxies on a viewscreen with a motion of his hand. What does Obie Wan get? He's a blue glowie, and he can whisper "use the force." Big deal.
Read
First, you need to read a lot. Dr Dobbs, MSDN, developer blogs, books. To separate fad from rad, I recommend you use your own common sense.
For example, a few years back I worked hard to learn and understand the Unified Process. There were a lot of great ideas in there, but I felt it was too heavyweight and over the top for what I was doing. But I did feel it had brilliant ideas and revolutionary concepts. So I took what I thought were the most practical ideas and used them. The most important ideas I took were things like 1) throwing out the waterfall approach and developing iteratively, testing and "releasing" after each iteration, 2) identifying the biggest show-stopper risks up front and doing research to make them not so scary, 3) getting the customer/end user involved up front and through the whole process. A lot of people might shoot me for saying this, but it turns out that the Unified Process was pretty much a fad, and those key concepts turn out to be the foundation for "Agile Development" and "Extreme Programming."
The point is, read and study anything that interests you, and decide for yourself what's useful.
Succeed
Second, you need to do stuff to get success stories you can tell when you're interviewing or selling yourself to your current employer. A lot of book knowledge doesn't do diddley if you don't put things in the done basket. Ever see people at work with dozens of spiffy certifications that can't code their way out of a paper bag? Don't be like that. Do lots of stuff and do it successfully.
I recommend you work on anything you have some passion for, even if it's not directly work related. For example, I did a lot of 3D programming when I was working as an Oracle PL/SQL developer. Totally unrelated to work. But I honed my OO skills, learned OpenGL and DirectX, learned a lot about 3D math. Although it took a while to pay off, all of it did eventually pay off. Knowledge of C++ helped me answer tricky STL interview questions, and I later got a job with a company that makes interactive 3D training software for jet mechanics-- way cooler than Oracle. And even though this wasn't work-related, I was able to include that work in my list of success stories I could tell potential employers and other people making decisions about me.
So do whatever you have a passion for, and do it successfully and to completion.
Would like to clear up some bad misinformation there. what are you talking about? second life is simply a very good way of getting people to shell out money for absolutely nothing. Paying upwaards of $1000+ dollars for a chunk of virtual space to build ($$$ to build, oh and to upload it costs $$$ matter of fact anything but wandsering around like a bump costs $$$ in second life.)
You can pay $1000+ dollars for a massive chunk of property-- an entire island big enough to house like 80 people. A starter piece of land costs a few dollars.
As to it costing money to do anything, that's not true either. I played hard for weeks creating things before I ever payed a single real dollar.
There is an advantage to second life.... Less kiddies and trolls because you have to link your credit card or paypal account to it.
Actually you don't have to link a credit card. You need either a credit card or a cell phone. But you're right about one thing-- it does scare away trolls like yourself, and that's good.
Second Life is a sort of 3D web browser. To me, Second Life is everything I envisioned and more when I first heard about VRML.
That's an interesting idea. If I were to try this, then I'd be showing my super secure password to 20 strangers every week. I suppose whether that is more secure is less secure than posting it on a monitor at work depends on the environment.
I wonder if it'd be possible to write a bot that reads slashdot articles, gets involved in flame wars on forum posts, and manages to get modded up to excellent karma...
These look about like conversations from chat bots in the 1980's. In the 80's I would have told you that AI in the year 2006 would be far beyond this stuff. But now, I'm beginning to think that it'll never advance much beyond this.
This was the first thing I thought of as well. A Wiki is invaluable, even in a one-man shop. IT's great because you can use it for publishing documentation to your users, and they can even help improve documentation. The built-in version control features of a Wiki will be a huge help. Another great tool is Big Brother.
You complain that MS is forcing you to recompile and retest the code, and you spank Microsoft for this atrocity. Then you go on to suggest that a good alternative is to rewrite the entire application in another platform. The effort to recompile and retest under 2.0 is trivial to accomplish and a very small risk compared to the monstrous undertaking of completely re-writing the entire application. If you didn't sound so level headed, I'd think your comments were motivated by something other than reason.