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I know, the box of fresh baked cookies they sent me threw me off. 
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book,
only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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Simple business applications are mind numbingly boring. Unless you get to work with other developers who are hell bent on turning something simple into rocket science.
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I know, there is already some of that which I'm going to have to clean up over time. It's a 30 user app and they are using the entity framework with WCF data services so they can do hand coded AJAX stuff on the front end. 
The usual stuff, wanting to cram every latest greatest frame work in all at once.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book,
only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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I'm having great fun taking a small business app from barely usable to a great product. The app is dead simple, but I get to play with any goodies I want to make it look nice and work well.
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Perhaps I'm not Geek enough, but what I enjoy most is writing apps that help people do their jobs better or faster. I wrote a simple client server app a few years ago; stored procedures in SQL Server and a client front end in VB6 (which we need to port to Dot NET now). Nothing super challenging, but lots of coworker satisfaction.
I wrote a simple VBScript for another coworker who could never remember how to map and open a shared drive. She was forever grateful.
To each his own I guess.
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Dale Lanz wrote: Perhaps I'm not Geek enough, but what I enjoy most is writing apps that help people do their jobs better or faster.
So do I which is why I tend to rub people the wrong way here from time to time because I think the end result of what I do is more important the process of what I do. I would never hire a developer who seemed *too* in love with the tools and not focused on the end users.
Yesterday they said today was tomorrow but today they know better.
- Poul Anderson
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Relinquishing surely?
------------------------------------
I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave
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The sagacious wordsmith has spoken. So shall it be. 
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yes, 2 major typos in my last two posts. 
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book,
only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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You might be losing geek points, but totally replacing them with man points. Figuring out that you don't actually like what you are doing, and replacing it with something you do like - that is one of the hardest things to actually do. The more responsibilities you have (i.e. family), the hard it gets.
Good on ya.
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Thanks. It's a major win for my family. Way better benefits, more time with them, more money and a stable future, rather than sticking with something which probably isn't going to pay off even though it was a nice geek challenge.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book,
only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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Andy Brummer wrote: The only way to increase performance is to move things to a distributed scaled out "cloud" type architecture.
Think hardware[^]. Seriously a lot of high-performance stuff is heading over to FPGAs.
I doubt it. If it isn't intuitive then we need to fix it. - Chris Maunder
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If the bottleneck was processing power, that would make sense. The bottleneck in these apps is the size of the state of the system that has to be maintained. If you need to pull up the history from one out of 500,000 keywords, one out of 500,000 referrers and one out of 10 million ip addresses along with various other statistics about user agent, source country, ISP, etc. Each one of those is simple and quick, however managing all of them on one box with millisecond response even with 128 Gigs of memory becomes quite a task.
The raw processing horsepower is minuscule, keeping all the required data fresh and quickly accessible is the main hurdle. It also has to be extremely cheap, so we are talking pennies per hundreds or thousands of records over time.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book,
only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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Fair enough - I didn't realise that memory was the main problem. They're not ideal for every situation - not as easily "configurable" as a micro / normal PC but if they're potent devices if used properly. The main benefit is that the coding is translated to raw hardware and is easily made parallel / duplicated.
I doubt it. If it isn't intuitive then we need to fix it. - Chris Maunder
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They seem like they'd be great fun to play around with, a GPU on steroids. Though if we get a complicated enough batch model, they'd be ideal. I'll have to get the science team thinking about that before I leave.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book,
only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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They are - although it takes a while to get into the right "mind-set" since you're dealing with hardware rather than software. Although having said that there are "soft-processors" available for them for extra configurability. Got meself one of these[^] which is a great development kit.
I doubt it. If it isn't intuitive then we need to fix it. - Chris Maunder
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From what I have read thus far, it seems to me that you have decided to drop-out and move yourself UP the happiness scale. I really hope that it works out well for you. I hope that you will not miss the challenges, the uncertainty and inherent opportunity of a large scale project, that candle-in-a-cave feeling that you may have awoken to on some mornings. I hope that your programing DNA doesn't betray you and keep you awake with questions. I suppose you have thought this all through, but maybe you should take a vacation before you make your final decision? Is there an opportunity for a horizontal move at your current shop? Good Luck in any case!
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One question. Can I have your old job? I love scaling out projects. Second Question: Would you be using Hadoop for this project by any chance?
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G'day all, I vaguely remember reading at some point a Programming Interview sort of question for a position working here at Codeproject, I'd like to track it down.
It was something to the tune of "Along with your CV, please include an application, as complex or as simple as you like, that does xyz with key-value pairs"
Am I imagining this? Could someone direct me to it?
Cheers,
-Jack
Disclaimer: I'm interested in scamming it, or at least an idea from it, for my own purposes
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That's the first part of the test. Can you find it?
I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt
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Jack Vanderhorst wrote: no
Letter from CP
"Thank you for your interest in our company.
We have carefully reviewed your background and qualifications along with those of other candidates. Unfortunately, at this time, we do not have a position available that would effectively utilize your experience.
We appreciate your interest in our company and will keep your resume on file in the case a position opens that matches your background. We wish you success in your career endeavors."
modified on Monday, May 10, 2010 3:54 PM
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A rejection letter? Companies can't afford the cost of writing, printing and sending such a document or email; simply ignoring your phone calls and emails is enough.
I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt
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Dude that's exactly it, I never would have found it. Thanks muchly
-Jack
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