CoolBeans: From College to Industry

I don’t know why, but I love business trips. Free food, free hotel, free travel. Not having to worry about buying tickets or paying for taxis or booking hotels or coworkers breaking the build. In the end you spend some 8 hours actually working but...

…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...

A tester told me the other day that I have the “dev magic touch” It’s a funny phenomenon. Mainly everything works perfectly on the developer’s machine, but promptly explodes on a test machine. Even better is when you go to a tester’s office and...

I could hear him coming up the stairs outside of my apartment. *Thump* *Thump* [Pause] *Thump* *Thump* Finally, there’s a loud rap at my door. I open it to see a man smelling of cigarette smoke, drenched in sweat, completely out of breath...

Which piece of code is not only reasier to read, but more efficient? Example 1: const int size = 10; bool FindValue( int value ) { int arr[size][ size]; Load(arr); bool fFound = false ; if ( value != 0 ) // Must have value greater...

Am I the only person who knows what I mean when I say “We’ll have to decide by Thunderdome!!” ? If you don’t know, this is by far the best practice for deciding on which features to ship. Or who gets to go on a recruiting trip. Or for anything which...

I remember taking a class where we had to perform a “code review”. The idea of a code review was that you periodically organize a meeting “not to last longer than three hours” and go line by line, asking questions and verify your thoughts as a developer...

How many times have you had someone come up to you with a problem that they couldn’t describe? And if they could describe it, you can’t reproduce the problem on your machine. And even if you know where the problem might be (thanks to an error code...

After coming back from the dentist, I was walking through the parking garage’s 3 rd level and noticed how a significant amount of water was dripping through the ceiling. I’m walking up the stairs past the 2 nd level and guy with a pipe wrench blasts...

Cute Dental Assistant: You look really young, how old are you? Me: Mphmh-mmph CDA: [Takes her hands out of my mouth] Me: Twenty-Four CDA: And where do you work? Me: Guess. CDA: …Microsoft? Me: [Smile] CDA: Do you ever notice how...

Here’s something I didn’t know about until I saw someone use it here at Microsoft. Data breakpoints are a nice debugger feature that let you find out when a memory address changes. Say you have some code like this and you’re trying to figure out...

You know what's great about getting paid to work on weekdays? There's absolutely nothing you have to do on Saturdays. Yesterday I got up around 1 PM, went to the mall to buy stuff, went to the movies, went to the gym, played X-box, watched some Futurama...

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...

I'm taking a stand. In utter protest of having to work the past two months without a single work day off, I’m going to require a few changes. Microsoft may regain my hard work efforts if the following demands are met: I will be allowed to sit at home...

Anyone else code to video game music? OCRemix.org is one of my favorite sources of free “coding” tunes. And who doesn’t get pumped to the cowbell at the end of the Half-Life 2 credits music?

At the college you are attending or attended, was the focus on a native language (C, C++) or a managed language (Java, C#)? The first real language I learned was C++ and later when I had to take a class in Java, I thought it was very easy. However...

Many of you I’m sure have played the popular Geometry Wars for Xbox Live Arcade. Now, raise your hand if you’ve found a bug in the game? My psychic powers say most people haven’t found one. Console games are generally very stable because the platform...

Coding outside on a beautiful day rocks. Thank you Wi-Fi.

Two dozen years is a long time to be involved in software. That’s why I’d like to take this time to thank God I've only been alive that long and this is only my 3rd year in industry. Imagine what it must be like, to have worked in Software in 1983...

Just because something is true in your little world, doesn’t mean it’s true everywhere. “Did you know that if you were to put Saturn into a giant bowl of water, it will float?” I need a big, fat “Wrong!” stamp. I hate scientific “fact” that isn...

Really, take your best shot: value += ((LPWORD)&((WORD *)data)[1])[i]; It’s not all that complicated, it’s not intentionally deceptive, but it is confusing. Such is life while working on a large project that you didn’t write. You will have...

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...

The other day we cut a feature because a blind user would not be able to use it. Imagine if you had a class project, where the professor said "make it work even if I close my eyes." Would you scream "Shenanigans!" at the top of your lungs? Well in the...

Many times you will go up to a professor and say "I don't think the assignment should be Foo, it's too time constrained or too complex, let's make it Bar instead". To quote one of my favorite songs, I bet they looked at you "like a cow looks at an oncoming...

(Note: I have not had time to craft a new set of coding puzzles for this month; I will post new ones when they are ready) Who here hasn't worried about money? No, this isn't about your salary or how you can make more or how you can get a better offer...