A lot of comments here are of the "scratch your own itch" or "just find a project and dive in" variety. I think those are great ideas.
But what about finding a mentor or coach? I've been a professional developer for about eight years now, spanning two jobs. In my first job, I had a mentor. Not so much for coding, but just someone to show me the ropes around the company, explain why things are the way they are, etc. I learned a ton from him; maybe stuff I could have learned on my own (or at least via asking lots of different people questions), eventually, but the frustration level would have been significantly higher. My mentor ultimately moved on, but by then I had gained experience and responsibility in that group. I knew what I was doing.
Another, experienced developer came into the group. I wouldn't call him so much a mentor, but a peer who was great just to bounce ideas off of. We could have easily worked in "silos", with a minimum of communication, and probably been reasonably successful. But, again, just having a willing cohort made things go a lot more smoothly.
All the above regarding my previous job has been underscored by my second and current job: no mentoring, total "trial by fire". Yeah, I know what I'm doing now, and can get by well enough. But I was miserable for a long time, given that there were simple things that someone could have helped me with and saved me a lot of time and frustration. And the "team" I'm on consists of me and one other guy. The other guy could have been a mentor, as he has several more years of experience in this field than me. But his communication skills are awful. And even though his code works, everybody who has ever looked at it cringes in disgust. So, if anything, he's an anti-mentor.
The point in all this: in coding, or even work in general, it's nice to have a mentor, or at least a teammate with whom you can have an intelligent conversation. I personally find myself learning more, at a faster pace, and less frustrated when working with someone who's at least in the same ballpark as me mentally. Especially with coding: I greatly lament my current lack of teammates with whom I can do "cardboard programming"---just talking through my work out-loud, or bouncing ideas off someone often results in better code or design, or in the worst case, a better understanding of the issue(s) at hand.
* ALL sweeteners, regardless of their source or chemical composition, trigger insulin production in the same way that sugar does. This is a reflexive response, where the body ramps up insulin production in response to the *taste* of sweet, not waiting until blood sugar actually goes up. This results in lower blood sugar levels in response to non-nutritive sweeteners, which induces hunger and sugar/carb cravings. This is why switching to diet soda from regular causes weight *gain* rather than loss in often-replicated studies.
Citation or reference? I'm not doubting you---I honestly want to read more about this phenomenon.
I keep seeing new boards like this come out, hoping one will have all the features I want for an ideal NAS (network attached storage) build. Right now, there is always some trade-off for what I want. Show me the board that has...
One board comes close: the VIA NAS 7800, but it doesn't appear to be available to the general public. And I don't see anything about supporting ECC memory. For no reason other than hearsay, I'm not so sure I'd trust important data to a Via chipset.
The next best, IMO (and I actually have one of these), is the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2. Check out SilentPCReview's writeup on this board. Only problem: I'm not sure if it supports ECC or not (AMD CPUs do, but I've heard it still requires the motherboard vendor to enable it). One annoying problem is that the PCIe x16 slot is for video only---you can't put a SATA controller card, extra NIC or anything else useful to a NAS in there. Still, while it's a very low-power board when paired with the right CPU, it's still overkill for a NAS. In general, I think the power draw for a NAS (excluding the hard drives) should be under 15 Watts.
The Point of View Ion/Atom board linked above looks promising. But, as far as I can see, no compact flash, and probably no ECC memory support.
I have two home-built servers: one is an always-on, live NAS; the other is a backup server that I power on only to do backups (or restores if it comes to that). First rule I go by: always use the slower 5400 RPM drives, such as the Western Digital "Green" or the Samsung EcoGreen. For both media streaming and backup purposes, these hard drives are still plenty fast. The biggest benefit, though, is that they use less energy (particularly important if your system is always on), and don't get as hot, making cooling much easier (which usually also translates to quieter).
My live server is currently 4 x 1TB drives in RAID-5, using Linux software RAID. (I know RAID is no substitute for backup, but I still consider it "quasi" backup. But I also have real backup.) This system is fairly un-interesting: it's your typical DIY NAS.
The backup server is housed in the Norco RPC-4020. For $300, you get 24 SATA hot-swap bays. That price is hard to beat. I haven't filled this case up with drives yet, and I have plenty of physical space going forward. The hardware is just some unused spare components I had lying around. Extra SATA ports are provided by the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 (which works fine in "regular" 32-bit PCI slots).
This, IMO, is a pretty simple set up. I just power up the backup server whenever I need it, and turn it off when I'm done. I don't care about performance, since backups are always run as a batch job (typically over night).
Before I bought that Norco case, I was just using individual drives with a Thermaltake BlacX SATA-to-USB hard drive docking station. This is cheaper, just slightly less convenient. I did order 50 "zip lock"-style anti-static bags for $13. I ordered them from staticbags.com ("GRC Enterprises" was listed on my invoice). After I copied data to the drive and put it in an anti-static bag, I just added it to the stack of drives I had on my bookshelf. The Norco case definitely looks better!
All in all, I consider my system fairly robust. It's only semi-secure against my stupidity, and since its all housed in the apartment, does not safeguard against fire. But since the media rips are just copies of DVDs I actually own, my insurance policy becomes the ultimate backup.
My recommendation is to avoid hiring the obvious jerks, and treat the ones who get through with decency and respect, while both challenging them and mentoring them to the challenge (not as hard as you think), and you'll get more than your money's worth.
That's a refreshing viewpoint. I don't see this attitude advertised too often; I'm not sure if I'm looking in the wrong places, or it truly is rare.
I've worked two "real" jobs since graduating college about seven years ago. I was assigned a mentor at the first place who really helped me understand the business, the big picture, always took time to answer my questions, helped me when I got stuck, etc. The job itself was "just ok", but I honestly feel that I was imbued with a higher degree of engagement thanks to the quality coaching I received early on---that itself was enough to turn a "just ok" job into a pretty interesting one.
In contrast, my current job was basically "sink or swim" when I started. I've been here almost three years, and never developed half the enthusiasm I had at the old job. The environment I'm in now views any kind of coaching or mentoring as "hand-holding"---if someone needs more than a few sentences' of instruction, they're no good.
[...] The reason why the HDHomeRun isn't coupon-eligible is its lack of an RF output
Sounds like a business opportunity for Silicon Dust. I wonder how hard it would be for them to graft an RF output onto their device? They they could advertise it as being coupon-eligible. If I could get $40 off, I'd go buy another one! Really, if they made the device coupon-eligible, then you'd have a cool device that's exactly what the topic starter wanted!
Not quite what you asked for, and I don't know if you can use your coupon (I'm guessing not)... but the HDHomeRun allows you two capture MPEG streams. It integrates well with MythTV. It has an open source library. Pretty sweet little device in my opinion.
For anything but dialup accounts, there's nothing to it. Most OS's come set up for DHCP on the ethernet. Plug the cable in, turn it on, and you're done.
I've had at least one ISP where they had to get the MAC address of whatever you plugged into their modem before it would work. I think this was with Ameritech (who I believe have now been swallowed up by AT&T) DSL. That was one thing the "magic CD" did for you: you ran it, and it went to some special address and registered your MAC address. And if you didn't have Windows (or didn't want to reverse engineer what the CD software did), you had to call and pray you got someone kind enough to help you out. At least half would just say, "Sorry, we only support Windows." After going through this once or twice, I learned exactly what to say to get my stuff working, but it was painful getting there. This situation may have improved, as this was several years ago.
Show that you can work with others.
I used to pride myself on that fact, because I feel I am good at working with others. But based on what I've seen in the trading industry, working with others is a secondary concern to being able to write working code. In fact, if you can write code that works, that's practically all that matters.
Case in point, the guy I work with. To me, the best programmer-employee is one who ranks high on all the following attributes: writes code that works; self-motivated; works well with others; good architecture and software engineering skills; is consistent in his approach to writing code; writes readable code that others can use; communicates well (both understanding requirements and vocalizing what he's done)... few people probably excel in all categories, but the guy I work with is a zero in all but the "writes code that works" category. At the end of the day, his code is helping us make money. But communicating to him what needs to be done is a painful, labor-intensive process; understanding what he's done is an exercise in patience and frustration management (both looking at his code and asking him what his stuff does is painful); and he won't do much of anything unless continually prodded.
I had no papers to my name, and I started at 68,000 which got bumped to 73,000 on my 30 day review. And it was in '97. I did have a couple of solo programming projects, and an internship at an evil corporation...
I say an MIT grad could get 60k with a bit of effort.
What geographical location was/is that? At least in the US, in some parts of the country, $70k is an extremely comfortable salary; in others, it's near poverty level.
It appears to me that the finance/trading industry is still going fairly strong, i.e. still has a lot of job opportunities. I'm not actively looking for a job, but I have my resume out there, as well as a LinkedIn page (I figure it's always good to at least be "passively" looking for a better opportunity). I receive emails from recruiters/head hunters about once a week on average. Most of the opportunities are basically doing exactly what I'm doing now: connectivity/infrastructure development for a trading company.
Granted, the topic starter was asking about system administrator-type jobs, but presumably, the companies that need developers probably also need good admins.
Now, bad news. At least with my employer, we are basically only looking for people with previous experience. "Training" is not in our vocabulary. Effectively, we are only willing to consider people who can come in and start delivering excellent work with a minimum of support and direction.
My previous job was at a huge corporation, where they hired more on personality "type" and believed training would solve any knowledge or skill deficiencies.
Obviously, the ideal employee has experience that is a perfect match with job requirements and has the right personality. But realistically, these people are incredibly hard to find. And how long is a firm willing to wait to find these magical people?
So my question is: do companies still offer training programs? I've seen this attitude here on Slashdot that it's lazy to expect training from an employer, that one should be willing to put in the extra effort to come up to speed on whatever knowledge or skill the job demands on one's own time.
And another, related question is: even if companies aren't taking the time to explicitly train new hires, are they at least allowing time to "grow" and/or mentor employees? Looking only at the firm where I now work, I'm afraid that answer is a hard "no". That not only do you need exceptional experience to even get in the door, but once in, you're almost entirely on your own: someone will tell you what needs to be done and expect you to get it done.
I don't like the "sink or swim" mentality; frankly, it's kind of scary. But I think that huge training programs and hand-holding are probably low on the value scale. For me, there's a happy medium: I'm willing to put in extra hours to learn the technology and develop the skills I need, if the employer is willing to spend some time coaching me in the nature of the business, helping me learn the whys behind the things they do, the business models, the firm's culture and values, etc. I think that's a fair trade. But my experience at my current firm, and based at least on what I've heard of similar companies, they don't even take the time to properly introduce the company, i.e. the go by the "trial by fire" method of employee indoctrination. Is this unique to the trading industry, or is this just the way it is now?
Honest question: how does git compare to Clearcase? I ask because we used Clearcase at my previous job. I have fairly vivid memories of cursing it at the time. I started using svn for small projects at home and thought it was the best thing ever. In my current job we use svn as well; it's a small team, and the majority of modules have explicit ownership by a single person.
Anyway, I watched that video of Linus talking about git, and reading many of the posts here, I think it sounds really cool. But if my memory is correct, it seems like Clearcase can do many of the same things. The problem I saw with Clearcase, though, was more of a policy program. There was a tremendous amount of code history from people who had no business using any revision control system in the first place. Then there were histories of different peoples' ideologies on how source should be managed. Finally, while I was there, we had a guy come into our group who, in my opinion, had a really sane approach to Clearcase usage. Basically, the best practices he preached made our Clearcase usage look a lot like the good parts of git that everyone talks about. But still, to have sanity in Clearcase, it required that everyone follow the best practices, i.e. a policy matter. Too many people either didn't understand the rational behind the policy, were too stubborn to do it any way but their own, or simply made too many mistakes trying to keep up with the rules of the best practices.
Also, CC was dreadfully slow---everyone talks about how git is faster than svn, and svn is definitely faster than Clearcase (in my experience anyway).
Another area where we struggled was integrating the offshore development team into our Clearcase environment. I am guessing that git is fairly open by design---how does it fare for distributed groups for proprietary development (i.e. where the code needs to be kept secret)? CC may have improved, but when I was there, the offshore team had to use this Clearcase Web program that had limited functionality that couldn't even do everything we needed to maintain said sane policies mentioned above. I remember the offshore team checking code in, then I would go through and re-work the revision history to make it adhere to our policy. (This is about the time I left for a new job.)
Anyway, I'm not trying to promote Clearcase in anyway---I just wonder how it differs from git. And, even if it is fundamentally different, it looks like CC can somewhat be hammered into acting like git in some (perhaps scary) way.
Final question: the git method (as I understand it) certainly makes a lot of sense. But what about for developers who "don't get it"? It seems like it would be easy in such a de-centralized system to bung things up pretty bad for everyone else. I.e., how is sane usage policy enforced?
I graduated with a bachelor's in CS in December, 2001. My first job was for a huge manufacturing company. It was like a three-pronged fork: I did training, development, and support. We had a custom in-house application: an enhancement or "plugin" to a solid modeling application (Pro/ENGINEER). I was on a team of three, taking support calls, developing enhancements, bugfixing, and even going on-site to give a two-day training class.
That job was pretty fun, at least for the first few years. Towards the end of my five-year tenure there, I became less of a coder and more of a "project manager". Getting a step closer to management revealed more bureaucracy to me, and it started to get frustrating. I started thinking about some kind of internal transfer, when a friend called with an opportunity: come work with him at the trading firm he and another guy were starting.
So here I am, two years into the trading gig. In the parlance of this industry, I am a "connectivity developer". As our business grows and expands, I basically write the same programs over and over again: one to provide market data to the trading logic, and one to manage orders. I more or less "code all day".
I took the job because I wanted to do more development---in my previous job I felt I was getting too far away from the code, and wanted to stay more technical. What I found when I got here, though, is that spending the first five years not doing "hard core" coding (i.e., only spending about half my time actually programming) made me a weaker programmer than I thought myself to be. Perhaps another perspective is that the trading industry simply demands better coders---I have definitely improved since working here.
One of my points in all this is that you said, "I don't think I would particularly love to write code all day for a living either." I interpreted that as some coding is OK, not just all day every day. And my first job basically was just that---some coding.
This isn't exactly what you specified, but you ought to look into development jobs in small trading or financial firms.
Many of them want C++ coders, but there is some demand for Java folks.
Why I suggest this: in my experience, the trading/financial industry pays more---potentially a lot more when bonuses are taken into consideration. If you find a small trading firm that is profitable, chances are they have little bureaucracy and at least semi-intelligent management (it's a competitive field, so stupidity dies quickly).
The other side of the coin is that you'll probably work many more hours than you're used to. But if you're willing to consider taking on part time work in addition to your full-time job, then presumably you are prepared to spend more hours working in general.
I'm working for a small but successful trading firm in Chicago. Even though I have a good thing going, I'm keeping my eyes open. My resume is out there, so I get a fair number of emails from recruiters looking for people with experience in this field. Based on this, my guess is that, even in these depressed times, the demand for competent developers is still high in the trading/financial sector.
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato
