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As a fresh college graduate I was eager to jump right into the workforce just like y’all are now. I hit up all the online sources, sent lots of applications out, and tried to present myself as the perfect candidate for each hand picked position I thought I could ace. I had a wall of opportunities (WoO) for short where I pinned all of my in-flight applications. It didn’t take long before bills became due. I had a job via my college, so upon graduation I was without any kind of work. I wound up following a lot of my classmates to scrub radar parts at around $10/hr or something lower. ...

Introduction This is to provide a detailed checklist on what makes for a good command line program. The quick list: Provide usage information. Output parse-able output to stdout. Output logging to stderr. Have a --help that describes basic usage and general purpose. Use exit code 0 for expected results, and positive, non-zero exit codes for unexpected results. Disclaimer You can always view my résumé here on the blog. From that you can infer a lot about my experience and things I’ve done. I don’t wish to appeal to authority, but having some experience in the field should amount to something. I deal with this stuff on a day to day basis, and from that I’ve learned some things. You can decide for yourself if it’s poorly acquired trauma or wisdom that comes with age. ...

Introduction Writing good commit messages may not be totally essential to the software development process but it is essential to one’s own sanity. “Self-documenting” code only explains the what, not the why. Even then, what should go into a commit message? Commits in Git git imposes a small amount of rules about a commit message. A commit message must include a “title”. Commit messages can include bodies, but the bodies are optional. ...

Introduction I’ve seen a lot of clamor over trying to “ace” interviews for software engineering positions. While interviews can definitely go well and poorly, there generally isn’t a prescribed “right way” to do something. In this article, we’ll cover how interviews are put together, and what they target. We’ll identify objectively “bad” interviews, and we’ll describe how good interviews work. Who Puts Together Interviews Interviews are generally put together by a team lead. Higher-ups want to give teams the agency for teams to do the filtering they want, so they stay out of that process. I’ve seen some interview processes where higher-ups get involved in a “meet and greet” fashion, so in a sense they retain some kind of veto power. “Boss is an institution of mistrust”. It makes them feel better. Let them have it. ...

Function Composition Function composition is the act of treating functions like small lego bricks that you tie together. Composing simple, well known functions to achieve complex behavior is like having and advanced vocabulary used to discuss a complex topic. If you want to try some of this out, I recommend Ramda’s REPL for experimenting with different JavaScript features such as this. Bespoke: Average Here’s some code for writing an average function. It computes an average value from a list of numbers. For reference, an average is all of the numbers added together and divided by the number of values. ...

Introduction This is still a draft. I intend to show off a few different languages and have it viewable via a spiffy dropdown or something. I have not yet had the chance to test all of the code. This is a series on simplifying control flow in software engineering. It’s a very tactical-level view, and it uses some functional programming techniques to illustrate this. Control flow is simply the flow of execution within a program in respect to its source code. These are generally statements like if, else, switch return, and even throw. ...

1 Introduction I’ve always heard the software engineering industry is a rapidly changing industry. One of the things that contributes to it (and not the other way around) is the frequency at which we abandon a pile of work and just start anew. I have not had good experience with this, and this post will go into why. At a very high level, here’s there’s one really big point I want to drive home: Rewrites won’t unburden a project from technical debt. ...

XML Namespaces The Skinny Depth Namespaces Prefixes Default Namespaces Querying an XML Document with Namespaces XML Namespaces This post covers the importance of namespaces in XML. Anyone doing XML transformations or data aggregation from these documents needs to be aware of them. This document assumes familiarity with XML to at least a minor degree. I am not claiming this document is complete but it should hopefully serve as a quick primer for anyone wanting to wrap their heads around XML namespaces. ...

Disclaimers, Audience, etc Objectiveness Articulation has Value You do You Actually Using Windows A History with Microsoft Technical Considerations The Model of Unix Hostility towards Software Development Career Considerations How Others View Your Career How You Treat Your Own Career The Positive Encouragement Away Wrapping Up I won’t willingly use Windows - not for development work, or any real work if I can help it. I won’t work at a workplace that requires its software engineers to use Windows. I actively recommend that people don’t work at workplaces that require their software engineers use Windows. I will explain why. ...

Why should you read this? I’m a software engineer by trade. I write software, scripts, and do loads of automation. I like using technology to solve problems, and I have a low tolerance for pain. At time of writing I’ve been doing software engineering for 17 years now. That’s 17 years of making mistakes, and making an honest attempt at learning from those mistakes. I like to think that’s given me some perspective, and part of that perspective is that I can easily be wrong, or not quite right, or maybe I learned a lesson from some painful experience but it was the wrong one. I don’t have all the answers - really this is just me processing some of my own difficulties, and publishing the thought process in a somewhat structured form. ...