tedesson

I'm having a pretty good time so far.

I am behind on posting my panel notes.

I am commencing my annual spree of "adding of people associated with WisCon to my reading list/friends list."

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/774114.html, where there are comments.

[index] Friday, May 25, 2012 - Getting Away With It

Ok, I know there are some of you out there who (gasp!) don't own an e-reading device. You may also have friends or relatives without e-readers who nevertheless would enjoy reading Movement.

Therefore, I have somewhat belatedly arranged for it to be available in paperback. You can buy it on Amazon or include it in a custom book at AnthologyBuilder. Or you can pick up a copy of this little brain-bender, which includes Movement along with stories by David Goldman, Marissa Lingen, and Sandra Tayler.

I do apologize for the cost of the single-story paperback. $3.95 is a pretty steep price for a 26 page chapbook, but Amazon wouldn't let me go much lower. If it's any consolation, I'm only earning about 20 cents in royalties on those.

In unrelated news, Mike Duran has interviewed me on DeCompose. Mike's a devout Christian, so the interview questions focus quite a bit on my religious views and the extent to which they influence my fiction.

Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun,"  (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.

The artist is Richard Anderson.

I'm working on "The Deeps of the Sky" tonight, and generating a regular festival of Words Word Don't Know:

luminesced, tropopause, sheeny, thicks, unnavigable, dartlike,

Meanwhile, I had a little argument with myself on twitter as to whether I should use some modestly bogus science to create a cool special effect. I went with it. ;-) Now I'm stopping because I have to figure out how the protagonist intervenes to stop the Bad Thing from happening, or how he mops up afterward...

Oh, I might have just done so. Woot!

Wave runner at Victoria Harbour near Lamma Island, Hong Kong, China, 2008.

Please see more in my Flickr account »

http://moshez.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/what-my-commencement-speech-would-have-been/

http://moshez.wordpress.com/?p=718

I have never been asked to talk at a commencement event. I’m not surprised — I’m not nearly famous enough. However, I’m pretty sure that after reading this blog post, nobody will make the mistake of inviting me. Here, I’ll be talking about a career as a software engineer, since this is the only career I can speak confidently about.

Anyone who goes to college, especially a good college, for a CS degree is making a huge mistake. Well, almost anyone. If you want to be an academic researcher in CS, this might be the right program for you. However, if you want a career as a software engineer, that was not the optimal to take. Sure, a degree is fine — but you can get one just as good from a minor college, and do a lot better for yourself.

But first, let me digress a bit from what you should have done better, and tell you what your college should have done better. Instead of teaching you for 9 months out of the year, and having you intern for three, it should have been the reverse. When you started, they should have given you a three months crash course about programming — C, C++, Python and Java would have been my choices. In three months, 40 hours per week, you can learn the basics of programming in each of those. For the end, you would write a basic web server which calls out to C for low-level string crunching. Then, your college would help you intern for some “code monkey” position — writing code for a large hairy web application written in a mixture of five languages. I’m sure many companies would love to hire a minimum wage employee to fix those bugs. Those would not be the most pleasant of nine months, but at the end of those you will have learned what bug tracking systems are, what source control is, how to work with co-workers and other important life skills.

For the next three months, you would have studied networking and operating system. You would finish with writing a device driver and a TCP stack. With these skills, and one internship already under your belt, you would be again farmed out for internship at one of the big-but-interesting companies — Cisco, Oracle and the like. There you would work as a temporary employee on one of the products that they are bringing to market. You would learn how to delve into code bases, how to ask the right questions and how to take initiative.

The next-to-last three months would be devoted to theory — finite automata and Turing machines, statistics, calculus and linear algebra. The nine months after that you would, ideally, find an internship in something that interests you.

The senior year (well, three months) you would spend on electives — technical writing, public speaking, advanced math, security, genetics or multiple other topics would be provided for you to specialize in. With a year’s worth of studies and more than two years’ worth of work experience, you will be snatched up by many employers.

However, your college has been optimized to train academic researchers, not to provide the software industry with ready valuable employees. So what can one person, without ability to change the system, do?

Spend the first two years getting a CS associate degree at a no-name college. Do the minimum work to get a half-reasonable GPA, and in the rest of the time, choose a well-known open source projects, and start contributing to it. Most reasonable projects have public bug lists — just start fixing bugs. It will be hard, at first, but keep at it. Two years of this should be enough for you to be a well-recognized contributor.

After that, get into a CS program at any local college that will accept you. Continue contributing on your open source project of choice, but now start answering questions related to it on Stack Overflow, and also start your own projects. What projects? Think for five minutes (on the clock!) about 20 new ways to improve your life using software, and choose the 3 most appealing. Publish them with a reasonable license (say, BSD Lite) on github. Make sure to try for interesting internships every summer.