[Shacs] Old friends (inventory of former CS students/SHACS members)

[Blake Householder]

I graduated Sam in May 2006, worked for a NASA subcontractor named Tietronix
from June 06 - July 07.  I moved to Austin and got a job with a small
startup named Minggl.com.  I did not enjoy my time at Tietronix very much,
and I'm loving Minggl.  I currently develop with Groovy (for Grails),
JavaScript, Lua, MySQL, and some Python.

You know how Dr. Burris (or whoever you take software engineering with)
tells you to expect production code to not have the same... quality as the
code you deal with in school?  I cannot possibly overstate how incredibly
bad some production code really is.

You will have chains of includes that include other include files with
selective includes that then pull a list of includes from a database and
include those.

You will have a database table named SYSTEM_VARS and no one knows what it
does anymore.

You will have configuration files named config.xml, config_real.xml,
config_new.xml, config_bak.xml, config_use_this_one.xml,
config_production.xml.

You will not even have source control.

Your bug tracker is a shared Excel spreadsheet that one guy always keep open
so no one can edit it.

One project I worked on had a 37 step install process for the project, and
the deploy process was "the lead developer has to spend his weekend
deploying the project".

You're gonna love it.

On Jan 30, 2008 11:01 AM, Jonathan Hill <jonathan.f.hill at gmail.com> wrote:

> Do we have some facility for tracking down former students of the CS
> department.
> There was a guy Ali (the last name escapes me at the moment) that I was in
> classes with
> and did some projects with while I was at Sam that I'd like to talk to
> again. I was there between
> 2001-2005 just for a frame of reference.
>
> Anyhow, I think it'd be interesting to take an inventory of former CS
> students/SHACS members -- work environment, location, etc.
>
> As for me, I landed as a lisp developer (yeah, really) at a small startup
> in Bethesda, Md. The name of the company is Preventive Medicine
> and the product that we're developing is an interactive, personalized
> health and wellness system intended to be deployed by large health
> insurance providers. As I mentioned, I develop in lisp on macs using emacs
> as my preferred text editor. (If anyone reading this has yet to
> take the language translators class, I highly recommend you try lisp as
> the environment as it provides really nice semantic features and
> the best manipulation of symbols that I've seen from any language.) I feel
> really lucky to be where I am and I look forward to hearing about
> everyone else.
>
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>
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