CoolBeans: From College to Industry

My apartment is a mess. After a party on Saturday there are glasses, pizza boxes, dirty dishes, empty bottles and bottle caps scattered in every corner of my place. Some might ask: “Why don’t you just clean it?” Well, I’m a procrastinator. As long as...

Many people take C++ as the end all be all of languages. And why not? It supports many different paradigms of programming at once: functional, object oriented, templated, metaprogramming, assembly and probably more. But what doesn’t it support? I don...

If I could teach an Industry 101 class, debugging would be a big part of it. Mostly because I’ve found class teaches you how to code, but never how to interact with written code. What I mean by that is how often have you had a problem in a lab partner...

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...

I had a great time meeting people at Cornell and Columbia this past week. Answered a bunch of questions about PowerPoint, Office Graphics and just Microsoft work life in general. It’s amazing how tired your tongue can get after 3 hours of straight talking...

This week’s contest will be to determine if a graph is 2-colorable. “2-colorable” means that all nodes can be colored with one of two colors such that two nodes that are linked together do not have the same color. Below are examples of graphs which...

http://channel8.msdn.com/Posts/Hey-Genius-Meet-Chris-Becker/

All work and no play means bugs. Ever sit in a computer science lab and suddenly hear a loud WHACK!! as someone does something destructive to their keyboard? This is the "The computer is pissing me off" signal. Other signals include hitting the keyboard...

NASA recently tested their “ Deep Space Internet ” protocol. It sounds pretty slick, enabling more complex missions with multiple satellites or rovers all communicating to each other and back to earth. Unfortunately, we won’t be pinging any satellites...

Many exciting things have been happening since we shipped Office 2007, but most have been "hush hush". As in "Chris, don't tell your friends you're working on TOTAL AWESOME FEATURE X as you will make them jealous." But not all my time is spent on cool...

If you already have a wheel, you probably won't try to invent it again. But if you don't have a wheel then you'll see a need for it and try to create one. The thing is, the wheel already exists and you just don't know it yet. In programming, a good...

Assignments in college come with specific parameters for good grades. If the project assigned doesn't have some kind of guidance onto how it will be graded, it's impossible to know when you're finished. But what if your boss came to you and said we...

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...

Over this last week I had to debug two issues. If you’re a college student and read this blog, you would have discovered the problems in no time. MessageBox from Nowhere As a warm up, the easy one and a new Visual Studio feature: Break All. The...

Let's have a little contest. The rules are: You must still be in school with a year or less of industry experience. You must email me your answer. You may use any programming language you like. You may use any tools you like to help you...

…Program Managers on the other hand have anti-magic. A PM walks into a developer’s office to see something and BOOM! suddenly nothing works. The other day I was trying to demo a new feature. Everything worked fine but then the PM had to say “So does...

This can suck. But it isn't the end of the world. Take a lesson from me: I was turned down twice by Microsoft. That means I had to fly out from New York to Washington state three times, go through 16+ interviews and get burned four times in a row (interviewed...

Here’s some real life experience for you. I once walked into a lab and sat down. There was someone in there who was leaving and told me I had to leave too. I said I had a class in here in two minutes. He explained that I had to leave now because the policy...

I always hate providing a SWAG [guess] on how long something will take. Predicting how much time I will work on something is never a good indicator on when the item will be finished. A talent a good dev will have is to take two 1 week features and...

I've been asked on more than one occasion: "Should I get a masters degree?" Short answer is no. Long answer is that depends. Computer Science Masters A master in computer science will teach you more than a bachelors. You can look up any course...

An ironically little known fact is that the PowerPoint and Office Graphics teams are more famous than most movie stars. It’s not because of our awesome physiques, or sexy smiles or even because our autographed pictures show up on eBay. It’s because...

While on vacation, there were many holiday moments that were highlighted by their streaks of geekdom. Such as my mother going into tears after seeing LOLCATs for the first time or me hooking up a router so my brother could play Xbox live (and now has...

I hope everyone is having a great holiday. This seems a good a time as any to talk about vacation because vacation is one of the great luxuries you get as a full time salary employee. Vacation is awesome for two reasons: 1. You get paid to do nothing...

Say the following question was on a Computer Science exam: Are you an Engineer or a Scientist? Explain. What would you put? I'll give you a bit of hint by your answer to this question: How much information can you store in linked list? 1....

I’m flying home on a jet, there’s a lot of noise from the engines and people talking. I’m wearing a good pair of headphones which have a noise cancelling feature turned on and I’m listening to music. Then there’s a noise, like the sound the wings make...