For more than a year, my co-worker Brian Skory has been sending out a monthly eNewsletter that contains insights and tips on how to get hired in the current environment. Some of his advice is tailored to specific situations and some is more general, but it’s all good information.
The publication is called Getting Hired: Insider Secrets from the Trenches and with over a year’s worth of issues, there is a lot of content that many job seekers would find useful. So, I’ve taken his work and implemented it on its own page at http://stoutsystems.com/getting-hired/.
Now these posts will show up in our blog’s RSS Feed and have their very own place on stoutsystems.com. And we’re still sending Getting Hired as an eNewsletter. You can subscribe by sending us an email.
Stout’s Bill Heitzeg is one of the driving forces behind a new software development study group. The concept: meet for one hour a week, bring your laptop, learn more about some hot topic in one hour than you would normally learn in weeks of unstructured, unmentored self-study.
Why does it work? Because the instructor for each one-hour session has already waded through the subject and can pick out the key, key, key things you need to understand. From there, you can make good progress on self-study because you already understand the fundamentals.
Imagine if our iPhone developer spent one hour guiding you through the maze that is iPhone development? If you have heard any of the horror stories about an iPhone submission, you have an idea about how much time that could save you. And that’s just the submission process!
So here is my question: if we figure out a way to make these live, interactive Webinars, would you be more interested? less interested?
The study group meets in Ann Arbor on Tuesdays during dinner hour. With a Webinar, we could probably do lunchtime study group sessions, saving commute time and time away from family. The downside is that the networking aspect isn’t nearly as prominent.
I’d be very curious to know your thoughts. Please post!
I have been working on a pet project lately. I’ve been trying to write a genetic algorithm to solve a simple test problem. In case you don’t remember genetic algorithms are search techniques designed to find problem solutions by mimicking natural occurrences from the field of evolutionary biology. They are part of the larger studies of Biological Computing and Artificial Intelligence. Long ago (and I’m not saying how long) I studied these and other algorithms as part of my graduate work in Computer Science.
The basic premise of a genetic algorithm is that you first initialize a search space with potential solutions each represented as some sort of string. In biological speak each string would be a gene. You then follow the space (i.e. the gene pool) through successive generations as some genes die, others strengthen and new genes are created through mutation and crossover. This is all supposed to be the computer representation of natural selection in process. With each generation, the “best” genes are selected and new, hopefully better, genes are created by mutating and combining the good genes. The idea is that, if this process works so well for finding unique biological solutions, why wouldn’t it work for computer problems?
The problem I’m trying to solve is purely recreational—I’m trying to write an algorithm that will discover the correct solution to a Rubik’s Cube from a random start condition. Some problems are so difficult that a particular approach won’t generate a viable solution. I’m so blind on this project that I have no idea if I’ll succeed or not. To my thinking, the search space – the pool of potential solutions – is relatively small. And I’m starting with the knowledge of the exact result I want. Generally it’s easier to write a search solution when you know in advance what you’re trying to find. Have I succeeded? I don’t know. I’m spending quite a bit of time early on just figuring out how best to represent my genes and how to manipulate strings in C.
But this does take me back to my study of AI—or, as I like to call it, advanced algorithms. Honestly I miss this kind of work. In some ways the advent of the internet has moved computing ahead by orders of magnitude. What were once disjoint point solutions are now part of the global connected computing landscape. But, in others ways, the internet has actually moved us backward (my opinion). This is especially true as pertains to unique or elegant algorithms. For example, have you ever heard anyone wax rhapsodically about the elegance of HTML embedded in a classic ASP page? No you haven’t - because it is anything but elegant. In some cases it’s nearly illegible.
But I digress. The point is I’m back at it; using what I remember about genetic algorithms to see if I can answer the age old question, “Can we really get all the red cubes on the same side?” My hope is that success on this test project will open my mind to other ways I can use this technology to solve more meaningful problems and maybe find a solution that I didn’t already know before I started. Wish me luck!
When I moved last spring I had a garage sale and one of the things I sold off to save storage space was my 75 gallon aquarium. I’ve been lugging the empty thing around for years because I’ve been moving so much and it was time for it to go. Well, now that the wife and I are finally in an apartment and an area that we like, I wanted to set up a smaller aquarium but I didn’t want to buy one new.
So I began browsing Craigslist and after a while started realizing what a pain it was going to be to try to surf through that every day because there were two different areas where I was willing to go to get what I wanted—Detroit and Ann Arbor—and those areas are split into two different sites on Craigslist. I noticed an RSS link at the bottom of all the pages including the search pages and I thought about subscribing to those. But then I remembered Yahoo Pipes.
I thought about how I would create my own Pipe to handle some filtering from both the AA and Detroit sites at once but I decided to do a search first. That’s where I found the “Craigslist Free Search” Pipe. Amazingly it was already set up for Michigan:
“Searches Flint, Ann Arbor, Saginaw and Lansing for FREE ads. Features include limiting the search to the 20 most recent, sorting by most recent across the 4 cities searched, prefixing cities with city codes for easy identification. Additionally, you can get only items with images by adding &hasPic=1 to feed URL.”
I cloned the Pipe and started customizing it. I replaced the searches to look in my areas and then I changed the RSS feeds to the more general “For Sale” category instead of the “Free” section. I then added two filters between the sort and the pipe output modules.
The first filter checks the item.title and item.description for my search terms (aquarium, fish, reptile and tank). The second filter narrows it down a bit further by scanning the URL of each item. Craigslist uses three-letter codes for different categories in their URLs so I set the filter to allow the categories that I wanted to see. For example, http://detroit.craigslist.com/gms/ is the category for garage sales so I added “gms” as a criterion to allow. I didn’t want to see any posts about “gas tanks” so I left out “pts” which is the auto parts category. I still see a few posts that aren’t what I’m looking for, but this helps a lot.
After I finished customizing the Pipe, I subscribed to the RSS feed in Thunderbird and now I get regular updates on my search terms pushed right to me. I know there are a number of ways to set this up and I wouldn’t say that original Pipe or mine are the best, but I’ve found some good deals without much effort and I wanted to share. If anyone has some tips on making this better, I’m listening.
You can check out my Pipes at http://pipes.yahoo.com/nickstaroba/.
I walked passed my 11 year old son’s bedroom the other day and saw him kneeling down in front of his desk frantically typing away on his computer keyboard. Puzzled where his chair might be, I made a mental note to check on that when I had a moment. Almost two hours later, I returned only to find him still kneeling there. Curiosity getting the better of me, I went in and asked him what he was doing. He answered that he was finishing up Level 14 of a game. Only he wasn’t playing this game—he was designing it!
For a while now, my son has been spending a fair amount of time with a program called Scratch. Scratch is a visual programming language which strives to make programming more engaging and accessible to children, teens and others who wish to learn programming. The concept is quite simple. To create a game program the user snaps blocks together into stacks. Blocks are designed to fit together only when it makes syntactic sense. The result is a program that controls and mixes graphics, animation, music and sound. And then, to top it off, creations can be posted to the Web site so that others can sample or even collaborate on each others work.
Scratch also allows users to learn important computation concepts such as iteration, conditionals, variables, data types, events and processes. Besides being a lot of fun, many kids take it to the next level by moving on to actual text-based scripting languages. Several research papers have been written about this.
The program is built on top of the Squeak programming language and is an open source—but closed development—project spearheaded by a team of researchers at the MIT Media Lab.
