What are you working on? December 2011

jsalvatier

This is the sixth bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

This is the sixth bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

I don't know much about the enterprise world. Which of the following sounds more true to you?

a) Enterprise programming requires fewer skills, or a lower level of skills, than other kinds of programming;

b) Enterprise programming has a separate skill ladder, and a good enterprise programmer has important skills that are unknown to most non-enterprise programmers.

There's a bit of both. In favour of a), enterprise programmers are typically less enthusiastic than people from smaller companies, and also generally more narrowly specialized - they may deal with some small area of a larger system, where a startup employee has to be able to handle everything that comes their way.

In favour of b), enterprise systems can have higher demands in terms of robustness (your bank going down is worse than twitter going down), scalability (most small companies haven't taken off in user numbers yet and probably never will), the amoun... (read more)

3Nornagest14y

I'd say it's a little of both. Enterprise programming below a fairly senior level doesn't demand much knowledge of algorithms, complexity theory, formal language theory, or most of the rest of academic CS; in a lot of jobs you can quite easily grind along for years without writing so much as a binary search. On the other hand, it does often demand knowledge of unusual tools and language features, enough flexibility to fit your head around arcane and poorly documented architecture, and above all the ability to understand and fix other people's crappy code -- something that academic CS does a very bad job of teaching. That's a fairly shallow skillset, but it is a broad one.

12

What are you working on? December 2011

12

12

12

What are you working on? December 2011

12

12