Software Development – Rachel Appel

Career advice for novice software developers, IT pros, and tech workers

April 3, 2018Rachel AppelLeave a comment

I’ve compiled a list of advice from seniors in the tech industry ranging from general career advice, to job hunting and interviewing, and specializations.

About the job hunt

“Don’t be seduced by the candy cart. They roll that sucker out Friday afternoon to keep you working late.
If you can find the company that does something you believe in, the paycheck won’t matter as much but don’t kid yourself, you still have bills to pay. Don’t let any company use nice views and a low cost of living as justification for paying substandard salaries.”

“Don’t be afraid to ask them what it was about your resume or public profile that attracted them. And when they tell you it’s all the speaking and writing and volunteer work you did, be sure to ask them if you’ll still be able to do that when you’re working for them. I’ve seen a number of companies who hire people like that and then turn around and tell them they don’t want them doing that anymore.”
-Chris Williams

“Random thought: Interview the company. You need to get as much information/intel on them as they want to get on you. Ask them about their practices, their work environment, expectations, etc. If you get vague responses or responses bordering on sounding annoyed, run.”
–Jason Bock

“Even if you are desperate for a job in the field, don’t just sign an employer agreement. Actually read it. Be aware that “employer agreements” may contain weird requests like “list your inventions” (which NDAs at other companies may prevent and it isn’t their business anyhow), “EVERYTHING you create – include stuff on your own time – is ours”, and other shadiness. If you don’t agree with it, challenge it, have the important conversations, and don’t sign it unless you absolutely agree with it.”
–Sarah Dutkiewicz

“Oh, and one would think this doesn’t need to be said, but for early 20-something dudes, it probably does: leave the bro culture at home. Companies, especially large companies, are working harder than ever to be inclusive. Things in your online profile which are not, or things you say in an interview which are not, could hurt your chances to be on a team.”
–Pete Brown

“To get the job: practice a lot, on a whiteboard, for months before the interviews.
To get better: read and write a lot of code, GitHub is a good place for that.
To remain sane: have your own pet project that you do just for yourself. This also helps getting better.”
–Bertrand LeRoy

“You know who else shows up at User Groups and Code Camps? Recruiters and hiring managers. And don’t be afraid to introduce yourself as a developer looking for work when the leader goes around the room.”
-John Dunagan

“Never believe the “job requirements” when applying. What they post is their WISH LIST, not what they actually expect to get – so if they ask for 3-5 years, apply anyway even with 0 years. If you interview well, and are (kind of by definition) a lot cheaper than someone else, you may well get hired.”
–Rocky Lhotka

“1. remember that a job interview is a two-way street. You ARE ALSO interviewing the company.
2. If a future team member is being a jerk while interviewing you, chances are he will continue to be a jerk after you take the job.
3. If you are part of an underrepresented group it is your responbility to send the elevator back down once you make it.
4. If after 3-4 rounds of interviews the company still has not made a decison and is making you wait an unreasonable amout of time, it’s time to move on. If I company really wants you, they should know within 2 weeks.
5. A company’s hiring process tells you a lot about what kind of company it is.”
–Jose Luis Manners

Go to every interview you can, you must practice interviewing. Watch interviews online, practice with friends, and in real interviews. Ask for feedback from every interview you do and keep a notebook of parts you think went well and parts that didn’t.

Build a profile on LinkedIn, and create a blog. Use the blog as a journal of important skills you are learning.
-Rachel Appel

General Career Advice

“Google/Bing yourself from an inprivate/incognito session and see what comes up. Do it in various ways, like including your school name etc.

Many don’t realize how quickly the results can move your resume up or down in the pile. Also, just because high school seems like a million years ago to a college graduate doesn’t mean a potential employer will see it that way. Stuff you do online sticks with you.”
–Pete Brown

“Whatever you do, own it, and do a fantastic job. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been asked to clean the teaspoons in the kitchen, sweep the floor, whatever, as part of your role at the bottom of the ladder.”
–Jen Stirrup

“First of all – the absolute best advice I can share is to be part of the revenue stream. If you are in IT at a hospital or bank or retailer it’s surely important… but most will unfortunately still see you as a cost center – and you’ll usually be treated as such. My advice is to be in a role in a part of the org that either builds or sells the product or service that brings in the money.

The second piece of advice would be to always stay true to yourself… try to be in a role that you really enjoy – even if it’s not the tops in pay. We only live once, don’t spend too many days doing crap you hate.

Last piece of advice… be honest and humble. There’s always someone who is smarter than you. You can’t fake it all the time and people HATE liars.
Go Eagles! ”
-Bill Zentmayer, manager at Microsoft

“At the beginning of your career, or even at the beginning of most new jobs, you are going to be completely useless, and that’s OK. It’s your job to learn as much as you can, and over time, you will become more useful. If a boss or a company doesn’t understand that, then that’s the wrong boss or company for you in the early stages of your career.”
-Charles Graham, Software developer

Find mentors. I recommend that young men have some women as mentors and that young women have some men as mentors. Find someone who is different than you, so that you can widen your perspective
-Rachel Appel

Sharpen those tech Skills

“Obsess about something that will make you stand out. Anytime I needed to master anything, it took dedication. So pick something relevant but something you love as well. In my history, it’s been drawing, 3D animation, photography, assembler programming, open source, CQRS/ES, #git. Each time you do this, you will generate a piece of a very strong foundation that can hold up, others, teams, organisations or entire communities. Doing that for #git gave me one of 2 gold version control badges on stack overflow.”
–Adam Dymitruk

“Know your stack. know your design patterns, in general and for said stack(s). don’t sweat code syntax — know and speak to common industry design scenarios, popular libraries, and solutions that play to established (and emerging) architectures.”
-Doug Erickson, manager at Microsoft

More than tech skills

“Be human. Learn to communicate over coffee, etc. Build human relationships. Technology changes all the time but basic people skills (eye contact during a conversation, manners) are always “in vogue””
–Brian Randell

“Learn to speak in public and write well. The people who advance don’t just have good ideas they share them. A lot of people think that tech careers are all about the tech stuff. The tech stuff is very important but you can stay in low level jobs forever if you can’t communicate. Most people are afraid to make public presentations – get over that fear and it will be a huge help to your career.”
–Alfred Thompson

“For my preferences as a hiring manager of many years, i look for signs of: do you take on relevant challenges and see them through to completion? are you collaborative — do you have testimonials that use words like “helpful”, “respectful”, etc? i’m not looking for “drive” or “leader” (which are typically exclusionary words) as Iiam for a strong ethic around contribution and delivery, and a style that really enables others as well as elevating you.”
-Doug Erickson

“People skills are a must. Invest time in building people skills. Getting involved in tech meetups is a good way to do this.”
-Rachel Appel

Careers in the tech industry

“Go to networking groups like the Philly Tech Meetup and other groups that might have topics you are interested in. Find a mentor and a good recruiter as well”
-Tim Dodd

“What school you attend may help you get some interviews. But generally only your first job. After that you need to show accomplishments. If you are not at a big name school you will want to do some side projects – something impressive that you can share on your resume and at interviews.”
–Alfred Thompson

“Do not neglect the power of community and networking with people. Since I started as an IT professional in 1998 – I got my first IT job “on my own”. Everything else has been through word of mouth, talking with people and being involved in the community.”
–Lou Vega

“I believe it is important to realize that software development is not just about the cool technology, but rather is something that involves many “soft” (which for some of us are very hard) skills.
Over the 45+ years I have been in the game, things evolved. My initial interest was largely fueled by a desire to get away from people, and a machine that did exactly what I said fit the bill. For the first decade or so, programming was a back room skill, and I could disappear for weeks (occasionally months) into it. Then they invented users….
The technology I work with today is completely different than what I started with. Dave Noderer is 100% correct that it will be a lifelong learning experience that takes significant time.
But the technology is really secondary to the people, ranging from others on the team, to those responsible for defining the goal, to those who will interact with the resultant software.
If anyone is left reading this, and still considering such a career, then Welcome Aboard, you are in for the ride of your life. Speaking for myself, I could not imagine it being any other way.”
-David Corbin, Independent Consultant and MS MVP

“1. Question everything. When you get a “requirement” from a user, ask yourself if you really understand every bit of it (this also applies in interviews). Work out what assumptions you are making and ask for clarifications in this.

2. Be prepared to read outside your field. Unless you work for a few select companies, you’re generally going to be building solutions in areas that you have no prior experience in. If you want to be good at what you do and actually provide something that is of use to clients, one of the most important abilities you will pick up is the ability to learn new industries/jobs very quickly.”
–Peter O’Hanlon, software developer

“The tech industry has specialties of expertise and sub-fields added to it constantly. When I started there were no Data Scientists, AI, or Machine Learning fields. Everything evolves, and rather quickly.
Look around for sub fields of interest and choose a specialty you think fits you well. Learn everything you can about it. A college degree is neither necessary nor important to many employers, if you know the core concepts about computing and can learn efficiently and quickly.

Regardless of your specialty, you absolutely need to learn a programming language. As already recommended, a scripting and compiled language is optimal. Learn hardware and networking basics as well.”
-Rachel Appel

On Learning

“Learn a modern language (whether it’s Powershell, Python, Java, C#, etc.) really well. Once you know the fundamentals of programing, and you know one language really well, the rest is just syntax if you need to do something with another language.”
–Lou Vega

“Share. Don’t hoard your knowledge in the mistaken belief it makes you more valuable. Share it with your colleagues and listen to what they share with you.
Never stop learning, not just in your field. Every technology dies. Don’t risk being an expert in a dead-end field.”
-Bob Simms, IT industry trainer

“Watch and learn what the others do while you do that activity. If you can’t do that activity properly, and with care, you’ll never be asked to do anything else. So smile and get on with it. If you can’t do the small things, you won’t get the chance to show you can be trusted with the big things”
–Jen Stirrup

“Never stop learning. I have learned a new programming language about once every three years for the last 45. I’m falling behind. Don’t fall behind.”
–Alfred Thompson

“Listen and learn. If you’re in the early years of your career, there’s a lot to learn, no matter how high your grades were in school. And continuing learning for the rest of your career. Don’t go into an entry-level interview assuming the company is in shambles and is looking at you to save the day. You’re entry level, and you’re going to be working with people with years more experience than you.”
–Jeff Cogswell, software developer

“Lifelong learning and continuously poking at new areas is really important.”
-Dave Noderer, MS MVP, South Fla Code Camp

Learning doesn’t stop when you get a diploma or degree. In the IT field, you either learn new subjects continuously or become obsolete quickly.
-Rachel Appel

The most given advice:

-Learn at least one or two programming languages in depth
-Be humble
–Never stop learning.

A 30 year sorting algorithm saga: from 250k to 14GB in one minute

September 2, 2014Rachel AppelLeave a comment

Microsoft Research busted through the world record for sorting an unprecedented amount of data in under one minute, with a new sorting technique called MinuteSort (with flat datacenter storage). The Microsoft Research team sorted the equivalent of two 100-byte data records for every human being on the planet.

That’s a rough equivalent of a short email message, for example, this series of 1’s represents 200 bytes:

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

This is 200 bytes of a plain text message you might send in an email.

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Good woodchucks chuck much.

Multiply that by the population of planet Earth, currently at around 7 BILLION, and the result is 1,400,000,000,000 bytes, or over 14GB in one minute.

That’s a lot of data to wade through, and sorting hasn’t always been so fast and sexy. Take a look at this scan of an ancient TI-99 programming magazine article from 1983 on five popular sorting algorithms, some still used today.

Bubble Sort
Shell Sort
Selection Sort
Heap Sort
Quick Sort

Here’s a sampling of the article, page 1 & 2 (Download the complete 5 pages)

Turn to the last page or the article and you can see that in 1983 the Quick Sort, wins the honor of sorting roughly 250k in about 1 minute and the Bubble sort can run equivalent of the 200 byte sample sample above in about 6 minutes (ouch).

How times have changed.

Sorting basics from Carnegie Mellon http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~adityaa/211/Lecture12AG.pdf [pdf]

Download the complete article

Big congrats to the awesome team at Microsoft Research! 100 points and a Geritol if you are old enough to have used a TI-99 or have read this magazine.

Common JavaScript mistakes and pitfalls you can avoid

July 2, 2014Rachel AppelLeave a comment

Having solid JavaScript skills is more important than ever in today’s web applications, and will continue to grow in importance as more browsers, IDEs, etc…, boast of HTML5 feature support. New HTML5 elements such as <canvas> , and features like Web Storage, Web Sockets, or Geolocation depend heavily on JavaScript. Despite tons of freely available, open source, or 3rd party libraries such as jQuery, Prototype, or Script.aculo.us, we still need to keep in mind that they’re just JavaScript layered on top of JavaScript – a level of abstraction. Knowing the under the hood workings and “gotchas” of JavaScript will certainly give you a boost with writing better code.

Developers that use strongly typed languages tend to treat JavaScript as a restricted rather than an expressive language, as they’re used to working with many compiler restrictions. On top of that, JavaScript’s reputation as a “toy, browser-only, language” precedes itself; many developers don’t bother to look deeply at some of its powerful features, as well as some language quirks that can really cause trouble.

The truth is out there: Dealing with truthy/falsy values

Dealing with comparisons and equality is usually straightforward, but JavaScript has a few caveats. Because of the way JavaScript deals with expressions, it has two sets of equality operators and some complicated rules around one of them (==/!==). The first set…

The “Equals” operator ( = = ) and The “Does-not-equal” Operator ( ! = )

And the second set…

The “Strict Equals” operator ( = = = ) and The “Strict Does-not-equal” Operator ( ! = = )

If you’re wondering why JavaScript has two sets of equality(ish) operators, it’s because JavaScript works on the premise of truthy and falsy values. The == / != operators will work as you might expect if the operands are of the same type (boolean), but if they are not, the == and != operators try to coerce the values, using a rather large and drawn out ritual to determine the result. Truthy/falsy values are a means for JavaScript to deal with non-Boolean expressions, by pretending as if they are Boolean anyway.

As a rule of thumb, JavaScript evaluates the values in the list below as false, and everything else as true:

false
null
empty string (“”)
0
NaN

Since values like null, “”, and NaN, aren’t boolean values but are still treated as such, that makes them falsy. In short, when you compare expressions that aren’t actual boolean values, JavaScript can produce results that are inconsistent with what you might expect. For example, if you compare the value 0 to false, this is what you get:

(0 == false)  // true 
(0 === false) // false (correct)

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

When expressions accept anything, including NaN, undefined, etc…, there’s a lot of room for mistakes, even by experienced developers. Amplify that with the many rules involved to mentally juggle, and it too easy to see how == and != disrupt your thought processes while coding.

The take-away: the strict === and !== operators are the best way to go, but don’t shrug off the equals operator just yet, as you’ll likely run across them daily in the JavaScript world, making this valuable information for the maintenance coder.

What exactly is an isNaN(NaN); anyway?

NaN, or Not-A-Number, is a construct of JavaScript that’s useful only in very specific edge cases. Why then, is this important to know? Being a mischievous little code gremlin, NaN pops up everywhere. It’s a property of the Number object, (Number.NaN), and default value of NaN is NaN, yet it’s a falsy value. When trying use NaN in an expression, NaN returns a false every time. Since NaN is no help in determining what is actually non-numeric, you’ll need an alternative. Fortunately there is a very reliable isNaN() function you can use. Notice when the isNaN() function evaluates an alphanumeric string, the result is true, and a false for numeric values. To further investigate how isNaN() behaves, enter a few of the following statements in the Console tab of any browser’s dev tools and browse the results. (IE F12 dev tools featured below).

isNaN() works as expected with numbers and alphanumerical data.

The conculsion: use isNaN().

Is eval() evil or just misunderstood?

eval()is the little function that wants to do everything for you, including dynamically creating and executing JavaScript. Want to parse JSON? eval(). Want to clump a bunch of stuff together? eval(). Want to make up code to run on the fly? eval(). eval() finds ways to do something, anything, with what you give it, making it easy for developers to do both awesome and horrible things with it.

In an attempt to keep eval() innocent, many suggest limiting eval() usage to the following scenarios:

1) You need to allow script to run dynamically.

This opens up your page to potential security issues, so only use this when it’s necessary, as there are a few different ways to execute code dynamically in JavaScript (a quick Bing search shows many different techniques). That leaves…

2) Parsing JSON

You can use eval() for JSON parsing; however, you are still going to run into the same security issues. On top of that, the JSON.parse() method works much better as it’s meant just for JSON handling.

In general, stay away from eval() where you can, it has the potential to get evil quickly, and there’s usually a decent alternative.

Avoid function faux pas.

Functions live a first class life In JavaScript, so they’re not just functions, they’re objects too. It all depends very much on how you them. Take, for example, the following simple function to calculate two numbers:

var result = function (a, b) { return a + b;};

In many languages, the result passed back from the function will contain the sum of the values of the arguments, a, and b. In JavaScript; however, there is more to the story. Opening any browser’s developer tools and inspecting the code, shows the type as an “Object (Function)” and its value as the function itself.

You don’t need to, but you can, define and name functions. If you don’t provide a name when creating an inline function, it’s an anonymous function.

Having the knowledge that functions are objects allows you to better understand and work with Open Source or 3rd Party libraries, such as jQuery or Script.aculo.us. Consider jQuery’s chaining feature, that allows you to “tack on”, i.e., chain, other methods to the end of the previous method, in a single statement. Since the function is also an object, you can expect to call methods on it using dot notation, as the following simple jQuery chaining example demonstrates:

$("#inputBox").removeClass("normal").addClass("error");

In addition to function behavior, it’s necessary to know how to write good, clean, functions. Since JavaScript throws everything into a global namespace, you’ll want to encapsulate your functions into namespaces with classes and members (see below). And watch out for globals…

A variable of global proportions.

The authors of JavaScript intended it to be a language with a very low barrier for entry for the internet pioneers circa 1995. Because of this, they made the decision to allow, and even encourage, globally scoped variables. One or two global variables in a very small program can be useful, even manageable, and was certainly not a big issue at the time since HTML had only a few tags and the DOM a handful of nodes. However, JavaScript has grown into arguably the most popular language in the world, and has powered a spectrum of applications from the smallest to the largest. Anything other than the simplest of sites can contain nasty bugs because of the global space.

When possible, avoid global variables, and here’s why:

It’s too easy to have variable naming clashes in large applications.
It’s too easy to overwrite the wrong variable, or the right variable at the wrong time, when there are many variables accessible from anywhere.
Not needing to declare variables means there are often “floaters” hanging around in globally-scoped memory, but doing nothing.

A good workaround to this language gotcha is to create your own namespace and classes in it, and store any would-be global variables as properties of that object instead. Though they’re not real namespaces, they are objects that can behave like namespaces, making it easier for you to organize your code. The code below provides an outline of how you can create and access your own namespace:

var SampleNamespace = new function () { };

SampleNamespace.SampleGlobalObject = new function () {

    // Private function

    var privateFunction = function ()

{ }

    // Public function

    this.publicFunction = function ()

{ }

// Calling the public function

var publicFunctionTest = function () {

    SampleNamespace.SampleGlobalObject.publicFunction();

Global variables aren’t the only problematic variables in JavaScript. JavaScript doesn’t perform block scope, so variables you define can inadvertently become as error prone as global variables. The only scope smaller than the global scope is function scope. This means that you can access variables where you might expect otherwise, such as outside an if/else or for loop.

Although JavaScript is a dynamic, expressive, language, you need to organize it into namespaces, classes, and other units for a solid maintenance experience.

Summary

Watch out for some of the most common pitfalls that developers encounter, even while using Open Source libraries such as jQuery. There are, of course, many more language quirks and features that can also cause trouble, as with any language. If you want to go deeper into JavaScript, here are two highly recommended books.

JavaScript: The Good Parts by

JavaScript Patterns by Stoyan Stefanov

A few tips for being a more effective solo developer

February 2, 2011Rachel AppelLeave a comment

There’s tons of developers that are self employed, freelance or consultant; some who take long term contracts on teams and others that have a few key, stable customers that they routinely work for. If you’re solo in the sense that you’re the primary start-to-finish person for most of your projects, there’s not a lot of resources out there targeted your way. Most training, talks, books, blog posts and other content is geared toward the enterprise developer that works on a team. Since that’s the case, I wanted to throw out a few things you can do as a solo developer to take some of the pain away from not having the resources that teams generally have (e.g., hardware, CI server, costly software developer tools, etc…) to help boost your productivity.

Use Source Code Control

Many solo developers have managed with their own way of using “copy & paste” source control. While you might have a routine down when doing so, you can still benefit from even some of the basic features of source control – with actual source control being the first reason. There’s lots of room for mistake when something’s done manually, particularly when that something is maintaining versions of sets of files.

Source control systems offer basic tracking of files and project assets that you’ll label with a version, and most integrate with familiar tools like Visual Studio (often including express versions). SCC software also allows you to freely explore code you’d like to write without you having to mentally keep track of changes when changing code, you can work on multiple files and roll back any or all of them to their previous state, without worry. It’s safe to say that most developers have experienced this pain at least once in their career – that is, chasing an idea with many changes to the code and when the developer’s ready to ditch the changes, s/he can’t recall what’s been changed.

Download TFS Basic for Visual Studio 2010 for individual source code control, and you can also use other popular SCC programs like Tortoise SVN.

Try out some Agile practices

Although you can’t do 100% Scrum (an Agile subset) as an individual developer you can do some of it. Obviously it’s silly to do daily standups as an individual, but you can still incorporate many parts of Agile and/or Scrum into your projects.

The Agile manifesto states the principles that Agile values…

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.”

These principles are easy to follow as an individual developer or as a team, it works for everyone.

One of the most important things to remember is to keep the feedback loop with your client open, and have frequent discussions with the client about the progress of the app. Respond to change by allowing the feedback from the customer to drive the next cycle of coding, which should be short (1-2 weeks). As a solo developer, you can create and use backlogs, use burn down charts and hold retrospectives with the customer. Those practices give a nice reality check as to the health of the project.

JD Meier’s blog with living Agile

Unit Testing – It’s for you too.

You may be thinking unit testing is overkill for the type of projects you work on particularly if they’re small projects, or that it’d cost too much to ramp up to speed with a testing framework and tools. If so, you’re not alone, as those are some common misconceptions that solo developers make (perhaps because they’re not getting out to mingle with their professional peers and aren’t getting up to date info; see below 😉 ).

If you’re looking for a low friction way to get started with unit testing and you’re already using Visual Studio 2010, then try the built in MS Test tools. After you get a solid feel for creating unit tests; the knowledge is there to compare other tools & testing frameworks such as nUnit or xUnit (xUnit was built by Brad Wilson on the ASP.NET team).

One of the primary goals of ASP.NET MVC is to promote a concept called “convention over configuration”. This means when writing MVC applications, developers are guided to use test projects when without having to download separate utilities, as well as guided to use other best practices. By using the conventions, your code will be cleaner and better, especially because you’re now testing.

Get out and mingle with your professional peers

Don’t get out to user groups? Code Camps? It’s a great place to network and learn new things, and keep your skills sharper than they’d be without. Get on social networking like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. These are all great ways to keep in touch with other developers, many of whom are also solo devs. Having an issue? Post the question on forums such as http://www.asp.net or MSDN Forums (among many others). Send out a tweet on Twitter and watch the replies come in, or post questions on a blog, many of who are on the various product teams here at Microsoft. Getting an answer from the source or a trusted MVP or community members is a great way to expand your knowledge base, stay up to date, and see what’s important out there to other developers.