I have started work at a corporate, everything seems quite slow in comparison, which is both good and bad, the pay though was a significant improvement.
I think it is what you make of it, having time to test thoroughly and use some different tooling.
In the making the most of an opportunity, I am making tools so that the test team (which I am in) no longer have to fire up database software and check the databases are up to date, quick winforms app just does it. I hope to build on the automation with selenium just to check sites exist as just a quick test after deploys.
As a way to get my professional development up, I listen to podcasts on the commute which at the moment is over ten hours per week. The podcasts working for me at the moment are:
- .Net rocks
- Hanselminutes
- Software Engineering radio
- This agile life
New podcasts I am trying out
- {coding blocks}
- Jessie Liberty - Yet another podcast.
Ignored my programming challenges and a couple of weeks away from it simple things take a little getting used to again. Anyway an implementation of the hang man challenge from reddit daily programmer. Hangman sln.
Getting back to reading, way of the peaceful warrior by Dan Millman was quite an eye opener.
Came across a new word percussive maintenance,
when you tap a device to make it work
So the heating has broken and oil filled radiator on, got me thinking, I used to fold at home a lot, after two years of inactivity I am still in the top 100k. Anyway it makes a good job of heating up the study without the radiator.
Install is so easy, no messing about for the GPU to fold, the GPU work units are not significantly larger than before.
Found another good place for coding practice, new challenges quite often with differing levels of difficulty and a community to discuss them with! Reddit daily programmer.
Had a few interviews and learnt a few things,
- Saying I don't know is better than trying to BS your way through things it still means you will not get the job so I understand now why many do.
- Most seem more concerned about specific skills than general knowledge, problem solving, and clean code, which seems at odds to what I am told elsewhere that specific skills can be taught.
- To me ASP.Net does not just mean MVC, only a few places have done this, where I have applied got there and then oops most of your experience is with webforms so are not interested.
- The blog genuinely seems to help with getting an interview.
- FizzBuzz did come up.
- Junior to me meant someone who doesn't know everything, knows the basics and willing to learn which is why they are applying. I think to employers this means someone who can do almost everything and can be left to sort themselves out.
One interview was quite good, "we need a junior who can hit the ground running" and paraphrasing here with no training and no supervision. Why are they advertising for a junior, in my humble opinion they wanted a lower paid middle weight developer.
Making it sound worse than it is, I met some interesting and very smart people so rant over.
To do list which I think would help
- Build own website to show off skills and store examples
- Build an application that installs
- Learn more about MVC
- Entity framework
- Linq to SQL
- Timed code tests to get used to coding under pressure, perhaps with some default system with a tiny screen. A lot of the tests were on laptops.
- Keep up with problem solving on the blog I was ready to give up last week.
I got a job testing! Which I think could be fun, get to learn about Clojure, functional programming has been on my to do for a while.
Good article from information weekly about the IT talent shortage.
Interview prep for ASP.Net 300 interview questions.
