Shey’s Rebellion

Finally, a book on NHibernate—it’s available for preorder, you’ll have to wait till July.

This will come in handy on those pesky NHibernate problems that I seem to run across from time to time.  I got tired of scrounging the internet for NHibernate articles and tutorials.   The internet is great for finding information but nothing beats having everything you need in one place, plus, I have a much easier time reading paper than a computer screen.

Interesting and informative reads on Web site architectures and scalability:

• Inside MySpace.com
• On Ebay Architecture, PDF
• 2PC or not 2PC (about Ebay)
• It’s boring to scale with Ruby
• High Performance Server Architecture
• Adventures in Scaling: 1, 2, 3, 4.

This meme has been making its round with techie bloggers– I was tagged by my good friend Ben Scheirman, here are five things you might not have known about me:

1. I love books and I read tons of them, ALL the way through, cover to cover, including the introduction, preface, afterward, acknowledgments and bibliography.
2. I got my first computer, a Commodore 64, when I was 7; during initial setup I couldn’t find the ‘any’ key.
3. When I was 11, I wanted to move to Canada and become a nature photographer, how I became a programmer is another story.
4. My nickname Shey was given to me by my 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Graham, my real name is hideously difficult to pronounce.
5. My favorite cafe ever is Empire Café in Houston. The coffee is awesome and the food is delicious, my favorite place to be on a cold Houston winter night.

Watch me kill this meme, I tag:

Thomas Nguyen
Paul A.

One of the greatest difficulties of learning a new programming language or framework is that you don’t know if you’re doing things the right way. Tutorials and books can only take you so far, then you’re alone; it’s not as easy as it was in school where other people were willing to guide you through the more difficult concepts.

You think “I know there are areas where I could improve, where I could do things in a smarter way, but how?”  Ruby on Rails guides you towards doing the right things with its simplicity and convention over configuration mantra, but what about Ruby, just plain Ruby?

Ruby isn’t perfect, it’s not the easiest language to learn after almost a decade of C/C++ and its cousins Java and C#.  My first Ruby book quickly became obsolete; its code examples illustrate approaches that are out of date, deprecated or just plain wrong.  Suffice to say the pace of Ruby’s development isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.  So what do you do?

Frustrated, I thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be great to see how other people write and use Ruby code? To learn from their technique” Then it hit me like a brick, Unit Testing!  Almost every gem comes with its own unit testing folder.

I must have browsed through every Ruby Gem I have and read the unit tests, not only did I learn new Ruby techniques, I learned more about Unit Testing.  Now, the first thing I do after I download and install a gem is browse over to “C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\gemname\test” and read the unit tests, there’s no better way to learn Ruby.

I still miss intellisense.

You read the job ads and submitted your resume even though your skills only matched two or three of the dozens of TLAs thrown at you.  Now you’ve been called for the interview and you’re nervous.  Don’t be!

The best way to prepare yourself for the interview is to put yourself in your interviewers’ shoes, and ask yourself “what is the interviewer looking for?” Understand the reasoning behind the interviewers’ questions, give him the information he needs to make the right decision about you.

Show them that you’re more than a programmer.  When I interviewed candidates I wanted someone who had delivered projects, not just programmed a module inside a package. Someone who had worked through the design and deployment issues is much more valuable than some one who knows the alphabet soup of computer languages but has done the same thing over and over throughout his career.

You are not your resume; show me you’re a person.  Instead of going through a mental checklist, talk to me.  When I ask about your previous questions go beyond the question I’ve asked, explain the reasons behind the decisions you made, why did you choose REST over SOAP, what tools did you use? Tell me how you overcame problems and handled surprises, what parts of the project did you enjoy the most, what would you do differently now?

If you’ve done these things then the interviewer will have a good idea how you would handle a real project; if the salary negotiations go great, you’re hired!

Good luck with your next interview.