CoolBeans: From College to Industry

Some reasons to be excited about working as a dev in industry: What you write gets used millions to trillions of times or more. Every day has a new challenge and ways to show creativity. You are never "on call" and hence no pager. 1 You...

I'm getting pretty good at this game for the 360 called Prey . In some levels of multiplayer, you can get in a ship and the ship has a tractor beam and the tractor beam lets you pick up other players. The level is full of walkways across open space so...

Right around this time of year, seniors in college will be interviewing for full time jobs. Any career fair will be filled with a plethora of companies of all shapes and sizes. This is a great time to get a lot of free pens emblazoned with cool company...

It is important to follow the coding conventions that your team sets. That said it can be an enormous pain to break personal coding habits. Coding styles can be widely varied and you may even have the "pleasure" of working on separate projects at once...

I wanted to talk a bit more on compilers and why you should be thrilled to work with them. Inlining Here is something I used to do constantly in every program I wrote: #define POW2(x) ((x)*(x)) For starters, look how awkward it is to define...

Who has ever met that guy that insisted on writing every piece of code to be as fast as possible? We'll call him the "speed freak". Thankfully, speed freak is less an influence in languages such as Java or C# because there is no low level access to the...

One more small post on productivity and next week will be back to code. Having multiple monitors reduces the amount of time you spend application switching. Whether that leads to increased productivity is up to you, but for me it greatly increases...

Every year at your job you are going to have one or more of some kind of performance review. Depending on the company, this can be an entirely oral conversation with your boss or a paper copy evaluation that you submit to HR, but somehow you end up expressing...

You need to strive to have good impact, but as a software developer in industry you will have impact. It will be felt by hundreds or thousdands or millions of people. It is a scary thought. Going to college, I had never written a program that more than...