For the first time in my professional career, I’ve found myself working without any type of laptop. I can still work from home on my own machine, but given how easy it is to telecommute as a software developer, it struck me as odd that my work machine would be just a desktop. It led me to think about just what the reasons could be that I have a desktop for working, and why everywhere else I worked chose to make sure that I had a laptop capable of doing development work, or at the least could remote desktop into my development machine. (more…)
Category: Work
General purpose post on employment as a software developer.
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“Herp Derp”?
Asking a lot of questions is important when you’re just starting a new job. It’s 1 of those things that cannot be emphasized enough. You didn’t get hired because there may be something for you to do sometime later. You got hired because that company needs help right then, and the idea is that you’re up and contributing in short order. But you’re just a newbie dumped into the middle of working on some piece of software that’s probably already large and involved, not to mention learning all about your new employer, and getting a sense of the new way of doing things there. There’s a very good chance your first instinct would be to find someone who knows everything that’s going on and ask “Herp derp?” Unfortunately, “Herp Derp” is a pretty useless question. Besides, very wide-open questions like that lead to basically you getting blasted with a firehose of information, overloading you and making it borderline impossible to remember everything you’re being taught. I don’t have the algorithm that optimizes the amount you can learn and the time it takes you to learn it. Having recently come through an initial round of firehosing, here a few things I’ve noticed.
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