dxmio.com

It’s been a fair amount of time since I last posted warning of the dry spell in my blogging, but I think things have stabilized to a point where I can offer some words.

Of course, the primary reason for my busyness as of late is the 4 classes I’m taking this quarter, CSCD350 Software Engineering, CSCD370 Graphical User Interface, CSCD427 Database II, CSCD494 Senior Project. All four of these classes has a significant quarter-long project, 2.5 of which I’m captaining (350, 494, 427), 0.5 of which I’m leading development (427), and 1 solo (370). I’m happy about development progress in 427 and 494, slightly concerned at the speed of 350, and just starting on 370. I don’t know what significance any of these numbers and words has to anyone reading this, unless you are directly involved, since I haven’t really offered any details. The basic idea is that 3 of them are PHP/MSSQL projects, and the last one is the game Breakout, which I will go into more depth farther down the page in this post. For the curious, you can look at wiki.dxmio.com to see the projects.

I started pretty heavy into the job searching last month, and I’ve probably applied to 100 places or so on the west side of the state. I have a number of contacts through friends and family, but no bites yet. I intend to continue sending resumes and apps for the next 4 months. To this end, I started a website to show off my skills to potential employers at www.benlakey.com . The site includes my resume in a number of formats, as well as several pages of code examples to display my programming skills. Hopefully this helps my search. If you have any contacts on the west side of the state, I’d love to get in contact with you.

As of a year ago, I heard things like “oh you’ll be able to find employment no problem” and “employers will be fighting over you”. This is not the case anymore, since the economy went belly up, and its been pretty frustrating to follow. It’s very unfortunate that this all is happening just as I’m about to graduate, but I suppose that’s the way life works. I think my substantial amount of experience, combined with my resume site and code examples, will make me a more attractive candidate than others, so we’ll see how things turn out here in a few months. You can bet that as soon as I get an employment offer I’ll post something here expressing my excitement.

Work has been going pretty good. I discovered that my internship will continue through the end of school, so that’s encouraging. Lately, I’ve been doing a pretty significant amount of refactoring on the SFTP libraries and applications that I’ve been writing, a lot of which I can attribute to knowledge I gained in reading Code Complete by Steve McConnell. If you are a programmer and haven’t read Code Complete, you need to. I’ve also begun to read ‘Design Patterns’ by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides, which I am told is equally as important as Code Complete, so I’m excited to get into that and apply its contents to my code.

So I mentioned that I was developing the game Breakout up near the start of this post. I’m really happy with how things are going with it; I created a very clean modular design, and I’m slowly filling in the various components. I’m so pleased with it that I intend for it to extend beyond the original class project, so you might see it show up on Google Code as an open source game (under a different name of course, since there are copyright issues). I don’t know if I really expect anyone to work on it once I post it, but at the very least I can point to it and use it as an example for my programming.

Speaking of open source, the PHCL project that I spoke of a few months ago on here, has completely died, because I realized it lacked any kind of focus, and the code was pretty dirty anyway. It’s still on google code at the time of this writing, but I intend to take it down shortly since it’s more of an embarrassing cesspool of code than anything, heh. There were some good ideas in it, but a lot of it is reinvention of the wheel, and in some cases, poor reinvention of the wheel.

Speaking more of open source, Ian and I have been discussing some ideas for starting an open source project this April. While we don’t have anything planned in any specific sense, there are some ideas floating around. The entire idea is currently on hold until April because I’m so busy this quarter in school. I’m very hopeful about developing something though, and given both of our talents, it should be pretty good. Stay tuned, and maybe you’ll even join us in the future…

That’s all for now. Keep checking back for more posts full of ambiguity, as they are sure to continue, although in an infrequent manner until April.