Joe, Infidel, gnometank, monkeyball, myself, ethea works as a company outside the direct medical field but still is involved in technologies and such
A few others too if I recall. Pretty huge industry.
We just had one of the original developers of the VistA system for the VA give a talk about the development history and the underground railroad. It was pretty cool.
I ended up in the financial industry. I wanted to get into biotech(like gene mapping, ect.), but that seemed to require a masters at least. Maybe in a few years I’ll go to graduate school for that.
That was my path, bioinformatics/microbiology masters.
Still pending. Maybe. :rotate:
0
Monkey Ball WarriorA collection of mediocre hatsSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I am the "here is some old as shit legacy system, figure out how to get the data" guy, nowadays.
I know what that feels like, though I'm in insurance, not medical. If you do a good job on that kinda stuff once, they'll never forgive you.
When we lost our web guy and I started pouring through his poorly written PHP code, I faked a loss of about 50 IQ points. A junior developer now handles our PHP work.
I think that the internet has been for years on the path to creating what is essentially an electronic Necronomicon: A collection of blasphemous unrealities so perverse that to even glimpse at its contents, if but for a moment, is to irrevocably forfeit a portion of your sanity.
Xbox - PearlBlueS0ul, Steam
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
I am the "here is some old as shit legacy system, figure out how to get the data" guy, nowadays.
Heh, I'm pushing to try and be that guy for one project. We need to process all the static IP addresses we have handed out, free up the ones that are linked to former accounts and get info for accounts that are still active so we can hopefully migrate to a new, significantly better system.
Based on our progress doing it by hand so far, I figure we'll finish in 2015.
I think I can write a program to automate some of it at least (possibly quite a bit if I can get info pulled out of our billing system) and have been pushing our soon-to-be new supervisor to let me do it.
(my ulterior motive is time off the phones and a resume bullet point).
I have a large project on and I am the only software engineer. The project itself should probably be a 2.5 man software team but our department is completely understaffed. I already know that I will not make the deadline given to me and my managers sorta laugh it off and say "you got time". So I have been trying my best to do what I can without burning out.
I am following pseudo TDD (sometimes write tests first, other times write tests after code) which has been a life saver thus far. I have found numerous little things that would have killed me had I not been keeping up with the unit tests. My requirements are flowed mostly verbally but in actuality nothing is set in stone which is making it difficult to define the system boundaries however I have been trying to keep my thoughts and ideas in writing and up-to-date as best as I can.
The main issue in all of this is the entire system needs to be controlled by some form of scripting. The project is in C# and initially before the scope of the project grew to what it currently is I had planned to write my own. However I now fear that it isn't feasible if I intend to make the deadline. I have been looking at a number of things I can potentially use to help me with this. IronPython and PowerShell being the two main ones. I have been leaning to PowerShell because the individuals who will be writing the scripts are not the most technically savvy. To them software is a sort of magic that only incredibly intelligent people can write (if only they knew how much bad code is out there, hell I have written plenty of shit).
I'd like to hear some alternatives to these. I attempted to make a quick PowerShell Cmdlet of my own and the code was fine but I was completely unable to install the cmdlet and use it. So if you have written your own PowerShell stuff I'd like to hear about your experiences with it.
Edit:
Types of things I need to do via scripting,
- Modify some configuration variables (So maybe change the mode of data transfer)
- Transfer data
- Check data against other data (Maybe compare that after some data is sent that some telemetry has returned saying everything went swell, or check some temperature values)
- Run other scripts (To try and keep scripts organized)
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Monkey Ball WarriorA collection of mediocre hatsSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
So I had an interview today for a data crunching company. I think it went okay. They asked me to write a C function to concat two strings and other than forgetting to allocate space for the null char I think it went fine. They asked some data structs questions like how long does it take to find something in a BST. They asked me to reverse a linked list and I think I got it. Then they asked me to do it recursively and my brain froze.
Once I was back in my car I immediately figured it out. Figures.
Still I think it went fairly well. If I get the internship entirely depends on how selective they are.
I really should get one of those lists of common interview puzzles and work through it.
"I resent the entire notion of a body as an ante and then raise you a generalized dissatisfaction with physicality itself" -- Tycho
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baronfelWould you say I havea _plethora_?Registered Userregular
Oh, are we doing the "What do you do?" thing still? I work on visual data aggregation and analysis, along with a smattering of UI design for new visualization tools and back end database tuning as we refine and develop me schema.
But mostly I just curse at our old application framework and slowly but surely port the thing to WPF/MVVM instead of the tangled knot of dependencies it is now
I was in the medical field in my first job, tangentially in the medical field in my second. First job was great, second sucked. Now I'm working on voice command-and-control software for a gaming peripheral manufacturer
@Lux782 - This is more about office politics than technology, but if you know your project is going to miss its deadline and management isn't taking it seriously, it may be "paper trail" time. Email them to notify them that you don't think you're going to make the deadline, and save a copy of the email for yourself. If you aren't already, it wouldn't hurt to do a weekly 'status report', that reiterates that you're not going to make the schedule.
It also wouldn't hurt to email the relevant managers copies of your notes, in case there are questions later about what was supposed to be implemented. If you write it down and ask them for their feedback, whether they give you any or not, then what you've written effectively becomes the spec. (Especially if no one else is writing anything down.)
@Joe K my family doctor prescribed "Imitrex". Unfortunately (or fortunately I guess) I don't have a migraine right now.
good. be careful that you take it when you're already home, you'll be knocked out within the hour. and if all goes well, wake up whenever without a headache.
the other big tip is to take it as soon as possible when you recognize the signs and don't wait.
did he give you the assignment of tracking foods/enviroment and trying to find out your triggers? A migraine journal if you will. if he didn't give you any info, i'll point you to good sources.
An employer who doesn't give a shit about my USAF committment wants me to drive up to Tallahassee for a day long tour/interview, as well as a programming test in any language I want.
I'm going with Java for the test, but they say they use .NET a lot, and it's my PHP that they're most interested in at the moment. They're aware I've never touched .NET before but that's not what the programming test is about. I'm going to be working on my Java data structures but what is .NET and what's a good way to learn it?
@Joe K my family doctor prescribed "Imitrex". Unfortunately (or fortunately I guess) I don't have a migraine right now.
good. be careful that you take it when you're already home, you'll be knocked out within the hour. and if all goes well, wake up whenever without a headache.
the other big tip is to take it as soon as possible when you recognize the signs and don't wait.
did he give you the assignment of tracking foods/enviroment and trying to find out your triggers? A migraine journal if you will. if he didn't give you any info, i'll point you to good sources.
No he didn't. He asked me what foods I was eating, but didn't suggest a journal. He said Chinese Food is a bad food to eat if you're a migraine sufferer, and I'm assuming that's because of the MSG.
An employer who doesn't give a shit about my USAF committment wants me to drive up to Tallahassee for a day long tour/interview, as well as a programming test in any language I want.
I'm going with Java for the test, but they say they use .NET a lot, and it's my PHP that they're most interested in at the moment. They're aware I've never touched .NET before but that's not what the programming test is about. I'm going to be working on my Java data structures but what is .NET and what's a good way to learn it?
.NET is a Microsoft development framework for C# (or occasionally Visual Basic, if you're unlucky). The MSDN is a decent way to learn it.
An employer who doesn't give a shit about my USAF committment wants me to drive up to Tallahassee for a day long tour/interview, as well as a programming test in any language I want.
I'm going with Java for the test, but they say they use .NET a lot, and it's my PHP that they're most interested in at the moment. They're aware I've never touched .NET before but that's not what the programming test is about. I'm going to be working on my Java data structures but what is .NET and what's a good way to learn it?
.NET is a Microsoft development framework for C# (or occasionally Visual Basic, if you're unlucky). The MSDN is a decent way to learn it.
I'll be damned. I have a fresh, unread copy of Head First C# right here, and yesterday was my last day of school.
3DS Friendcode 5413-1311-3767
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited April 2012
If you know Java, the transition to C# is easy. The hardest part is learning the standard libraries, but frankly having been a professional dev in both, I think the .NET framework is laid out better and has a pretty consistent theme to follow once you understand it.
You'll want to pay special attention to the sections on lambdas and anonymous types, as those are things Java does not have, but are used very prominently in the .NET world. The entire concept of LINQ is based on them.
Pretty much. At first you'll begrudgingly "stick with" Java because it's what you know. Eventually you start to realize that the .NET framework does almost everything better, and in a more sane manner, and that the C# language has some constructs it becomes hard to live without (lambdas). You then realize it's effectively as cross-platform as Java is (barring some phones and set-top boxes of course), without making some inane promise of "write once, run anywhere" (thanks Mono).
Except in the cases of special VM's, it's stock execution environment is much more efficient than Java's as well. The stock hotspot VM is terribad at this point, and hasn't seen a major revision in a decade. There are some special-case VM's like Dvorak for Android that are quick, but they are tuned and optimized specifically for the platform.
I won't even get started on UI development, which at least for Windows, is orders of magnitude better in .NET than Java. Even for Linux on Mono, there is GTK#, and 99% of WinForms code will port over untouched, where Mono just presents a wrapper around GTK# using the WinForms API.
You then realize it's effectively as cross-platform as Java is (barring some phones and set-top boxes of course), without making some inane promise of "write once, run anywhere" (thanks Mono).
Has mono really improved that much recently? The last time I looked at it was maybe a year or two ago, and I remember thinking it wasn't good enough (for me to migrate to F#) at that point. I guess I should take it for a spin.
Assuming you're not using things like notify icon, it works pretty flawlessly. I wrote a TCP api for my application and it works seamlessly between the two. Winapi stuff seems to work reasonably well too. I'm a bit angry monodevelop doesn't come with winapi stuff from the get go and you basically are forced to use monoGTK shit.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I think I wrote a web server in C# a while back just to do it, wrote my own scripting language too. And it actually worked faster on a slower machine in mono than in .NET on a windows box. Was pretty classy.
And then some bot tried to do a DoS attack on it or something and just held the connection open/randomly fed it weird bytes and it was really just meant to handle one connection at a time, atomically. That was an interesting log though, not sure what they were trying to do. My log file just showed like 100 megs of random bytes of data
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
0
Mike Danger"Diane..."a place both wonderful and strangeRegistered Userregular
So, my laptop charger broke after 4 years and I sent away for a new one, but it's not going to be here for a while. I managed to get one of the CS department Ubuntu terminals set up with all my rails stuff, cloned the git repository and...realized the database wasn't in the repository. Guess I get to take a walk across the street to get the file off my laptop.
Pretty much. At first you'll begrudgingly "stick with" Java because it's what you know. Eventually you start to realize that the .NET framework does almost everything better, and in a more sane manner, and that the C# language has some constructs it becomes hard to live without (lambdas). You then realize it's effectively as cross-platform as Java is (barring some phones and set-top boxes of course), without making some inane promise of "write once, run anywhere" (thanks Mono).
Except in the cases of special VM's, it's stock execution environment is much more efficient than Java's as well. The stock hotspot VM is terribad at this point, and hasn't seen a major revision in a decade. There are some special-case VM's like Dvorak for Android that are quick, but they are tuned and optimized specifically for the platform.
I won't even get started on UI development, which at least for Windows, is orders of magnitude better in .NET than Java. Even for Linux on Mono, there is GTK#, and 99% of WinForms code will port over untouched, where Mono just presents a wrapper around GTK# using the WinForms API.
I wonder what the employer is referring to when he says "we like .NET". It's not necessarily synonymous with "we like C#" but I went ahead and asked.
All my fancier data structures are in C and Java, and all my user interfaces are...well...websites.
I wonder what the employer is referring to when he says "we like .NET". It's not necessarily synonymous with "we like C#" but I went ahead and asked.
All my fancier data structures are in C and Java, and all my user interfaces are...well...websites.
.NET is, as much as anything, an exercise in marketing. Bosses saying "we like .NET" could just mean "hey, this kool-aid tastes pretty good."
From a web perspective, .NET provides a full Microsoft stack. Instead of Apache/Tomcat/Java/JSP, you'd have IIS/C#/F#/VB.NET/ASP.NET. It's a decent set of alternatives - I've found that Java/JSP ports over pretty easily to C#/ASP.NET.
I wonder what the employer is referring to when he says "we like .NET". It's not necessarily synonymous with "we like C#" but I went ahead and asked.
All my fancier data structures are in C and Java, and all my user interfaces are...well...websites.
.NET is, as much as anything, an exercise in marketing. Bosses saying "we like .NET" could just mean "hey, this kool-aid tastes pretty good."
From a web perspective, .NET provides a full Microsoft stack. Instead of Apache/Tomcat/Java/JSP, you'd have IIS/C#/F#/VB.NET/ASP.NET. It's a decent set of alternatives - I've found that Java/JSP ports over pretty easily to C#/ASP.NET.
He says it's VB.NET that they use, but that learning C# is good too.
3DS Friendcode 5413-1311-3767
0
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Posts
We just had one of the original developers of the VistA system for the VA give a talk about the development history and the underground railroad. It was pretty cool.
That was my path, bioinformatics/microbiology masters.
Still pending. Maybe. :rotate:
No I just interned at an insurance company. I haven't even graduated yet, there's no telling where I'll end up. The job hunt is just starting
Edit: Man I wish I could change my user name, I haven't used this handle for anything other than this forum in something like a decade.
Hardwood. :winky:
But seriously, I work for a lumber trading house on internal systems and e-commerce sites.
Ladies.
Upside: Validating equipment out on the water with the work boat on a sunny day.
Downside: I get seasick if the boat stays still in choppy conditions.
Upside: Interesting technical challenges!
you are Barclay from that episode where he becomes superhuman and fuses with the ship computer via the holodeck
Fun... until one dark and stormy day...
"Hey ecco, we need some measurements on how this performs in worst case sea conditions, just to make sure that it doesn't fall apart in bad weather."
:?
Later, out on the boat:
:rotate:
I know what that feels like, though I'm in insurance, not medical. If you do a good job on that kinda stuff once, they'll never forgive you.
When we lost our web guy and I started pouring through his poorly written PHP code, I faked a loss of about 50 IQ points. A junior developer now handles our PHP work.
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
Heh, I'm pushing to try and be that guy for one project. We need to process all the static IP addresses we have handed out, free up the ones that are linked to former accounts and get info for accounts that are still active so we can hopefully migrate to a new, significantly better system.
Based on our progress doing it by hand so far, I figure we'll finish in 2015.
I think I can write a program to automate some of it at least (possibly quite a bit if I can get info pulled out of our billing system) and have been pushing our soon-to-be new supervisor to let me do it.
(my ulterior motive is time off the phones and a resume bullet point).
I have a large project on and I am the only software engineer. The project itself should probably be a 2.5 man software team but our department is completely understaffed. I already know that I will not make the deadline given to me and my managers sorta laugh it off and say "you got time". So I have been trying my best to do what I can without burning out.
I am following pseudo TDD (sometimes write tests first, other times write tests after code) which has been a life saver thus far. I have found numerous little things that would have killed me had I not been keeping up with the unit tests. My requirements are flowed mostly verbally but in actuality nothing is set in stone which is making it difficult to define the system boundaries however I have been trying to keep my thoughts and ideas in writing and up-to-date as best as I can.
The main issue in all of this is the entire system needs to be controlled by some form of scripting. The project is in C# and initially before the scope of the project grew to what it currently is I had planned to write my own. However I now fear that it isn't feasible if I intend to make the deadline. I have been looking at a number of things I can potentially use to help me with this. IronPython and PowerShell being the two main ones. I have been leaning to PowerShell because the individuals who will be writing the scripts are not the most technically savvy. To them software is a sort of magic that only incredibly intelligent people can write (if only they knew how much bad code is out there, hell I have written plenty of shit).
I'd like to hear some alternatives to these. I attempted to make a quick PowerShell Cmdlet of my own and the code was fine but I was completely unable to install the cmdlet and use it. So if you have written your own PowerShell stuff I'd like to hear about your experiences with it.
Edit:
Types of things I need to do via scripting,
- Modify some configuration variables (So maybe change the mode of data transfer)
- Transfer data
- Check data against other data (Maybe compare that after some data is sent that some telemetry has returned saying everything went swell, or check some temperature values)
- Run other scripts (To try and keep scripts organized)
Once I was back in my car I immediately figured it out. Figures.
Still I think it went fairly well. If I get the internship entirely depends on how selective they are.
I really should get one of those lists of common interview puzzles and work through it.
But mostly I just curse at our old application framework and slowly but surely port the thing to WPF/MVVM instead of the tangled knot of dependencies it is now
It also wouldn't hurt to email the relevant managers copies of your notes, in case there are questions later about what was supposed to be implemented. If you write it down and ask them for their feedback, whether they give you any or not, then what you've written effectively becomes the spec. (Especially if no one else is writing anything down.)
Why yes, I am paranoid. Why do you ask? :rotate:
good. be careful that you take it when you're already home, you'll be knocked out within the hour. and if all goes well, wake up whenever without a headache.
the other big tip is to take it as soon as possible when you recognize the signs and don't wait.
did he give you the assignment of tracking foods/enviroment and trying to find out your triggers? A migraine journal if you will. if he didn't give you any info, i'll point you to good sources.
Joe's Stream.
I'm going with Java for the test, but they say they use .NET a lot, and it's my PHP that they're most interested in at the moment. They're aware I've never touched .NET before but that's not what the programming test is about. I'm going to be working on my Java data structures but what is .NET and what's a good way to learn it?
No he didn't. He asked me what foods I was eating, but didn't suggest a journal. He said Chinese Food is a bad food to eat if you're a migraine sufferer, and I'm assuming that's because of the MSG.
Sodium is your biggest problem there, which is in Chinese food, or a lot of processed foods.
Virtualbox of Fedora running:
Redis for real time game data
Node.js for websockets support
Rack for client delivery
Client is
Socket.IO for communications
Canvas via (mostly) EaselJS for graphics
All written in one giant coffeescript file
TO DO:
Basic combat logic
Login/Authentication
Chat
I don't think I can (or want to) do auth with Redis. I'll have to find something else.
.NET is a Microsoft development framework for C# (or occasionally Visual Basic, if you're unlucky). The MSDN is a decent way to learn it.
I'll be damned. I have a fresh, unread copy of Head First C# right here, and yesterday was my last day of school.
You'll want to pay special attention to the sections on lambdas and anonymous types, as those are things Java does not have, but are used very prominently in the .NET world. The entire concept of LINQ is based on them.
Pretty much. At first you'll begrudgingly "stick with" Java because it's what you know. Eventually you start to realize that the .NET framework does almost everything better, and in a more sane manner, and that the C# language has some constructs it becomes hard to live without (lambdas). You then realize it's effectively as cross-platform as Java is (barring some phones and set-top boxes of course), without making some inane promise of "write once, run anywhere" (thanks Mono).
Except in the cases of special VM's, it's stock execution environment is much more efficient than Java's as well. The stock hotspot VM is terribad at this point, and hasn't seen a major revision in a decade. There are some special-case VM's like Dvorak for Android that are quick, but they are tuned and optimized specifically for the platform.
I won't even get started on UI development, which at least for Windows, is orders of magnitude better in .NET than Java. Even for Linux on Mono, there is GTK#, and 99% of WinForms code will port over untouched, where Mono just presents a wrapper around GTK# using the WinForms API.
And that's why there are so many Java devs. :rotate:
Has mono really improved that much recently? The last time I looked at it was maybe a year or two ago, and I remember thinking it wasn't good enough (for me to migrate to F#) at that point. I guess I should take it for a spin.
And then some bot tried to do a DoS attack on it or something and just held the connection open/randomly fed it weird bytes and it was really just meant to handle one connection at a time, atomically. That was an interesting log though, not sure what they were trying to do. My log file just showed like 100 megs of random bytes of data
I wonder what the employer is referring to when he says "we like .NET". It's not necessarily synonymous with "we like C#" but I went ahead and asked.
All my fancier data structures are in C and Java, and all my user interfaces are...well...websites.
.NET is, as much as anything, an exercise in marketing. Bosses saying "we like .NET" could just mean "hey, this kool-aid tastes pretty good."
From a web perspective, .NET provides a full Microsoft stack. Instead of Apache/Tomcat/Java/JSP, you'd have IIS/C#/F#/VB.NET/ASP.NET. It's a decent set of alternatives - I've found that Java/JSP ports over pretty easily to C#/ASP.NET.
He says it's VB.NET that they use, but that learning C# is good too.
Either way, it's still Florida until the USAF calls me