CSC – My experience this year

The purpose of this post is to let people know how I’m getting on at CSC and what i have been up to 5 days a week, paying particular attention to what it is like in the industry to prepare people at University in my year.

I have been working for CSC now for 4 months on an industrial placement. In these 4 months I have learnt and experienced an immeasurable amount of skills working in the IT industry. I have got to say i definitely don’t regret taking a year out from my degree (although there was times where I thought I wish I was in DEC10 pulling all nighters with the crew), I definitely recommend it.

I have increased my technical skills over the last 4 months but I think what i have learnt most of all is how a software development environment works, how people think in the industry, how people develop and interact with peers/ managers, how we interact with users. All this stuff from a students perspective is perceived as wishy washy irrelevant stuff, but it is essential (Owen knows! Owen is right!)

Linking the software development to business cases is pivotal too, as it is a business after all and we need to try and quantify the savings a company gets from better software, so we get paid for coding it! Although sometimes this can be a challenge, especially within the NHS!

Another important point to note is being a ‘Software Engineer’ (yes that’s my job title, sexy i know d:)  from my experience working on a small development team is more than coding, a lot more.  Testing, deploying code, designing interfaces and models, documentation both in and out of code, configuration on servers and local machines, management of databases and resources and user involvement are all just as important.

Technically speaking I have had experience in a good number of different technologies, some at greater depth than others. A few i have listed below:

• Programming in C# and the .NET environment.
• ASP.NET, XHTML, CSS, AJAX with JS
• XML
• SQL SERVER  and T-SQL scripting
•  using O(i)SQL/MSDOS scripts for deployment
• Crsytal Reports
• VBA (this is not as easy as it sounds)

So… what do i actually code i hear you asking? Well I’m going to deliberately leave that out of this public blog post because of confidentiality and such (:

Overall I have had a good 4 months!

I am off for 10 days for family time + food @ xmas then partying with friends + drink @ new years before i return to the routine of 9 till 5 until August.  This is the one thing that’s a drag sometimes, the same routine every day, I like variety and impulsiveness as some days I’m in the zone and lovin’ coding and getting loads of work done then some-days I’m tired.

But Overall I am liking my year out and would like to thank all that have supported and helped me be where I am now.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

Visual programming language

A friend in the video games industry has made me aware of a new programming language that is in beta release at the moment named ‘Processing’. It is a language based on Java and is purely Object-Oriented in the sense it only uses Java’s inner classes not any static classes/structures.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions – aimed at graphics artists and such.

From a brief glance at the IDE it seems to be similar to Microsoft’s GDI+ library provided for C# of the .NET suite but slightly more mathematically based like VRML, with transformations, matrix-es etc. provided for you as black-boxes. This means you can code semi-complex moving graphics that look very sweet, very easily.

I am impressed at first glance, when I get time I shall dig further and report back!

home page for the language: http://www.processing.org/

wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processing_%28programming_language%29

running example:

Example of the ide (click for larger image):

fluid looking ‘advanced’ code

When reading code I do love to see things done in more compact ways compared to over many lines, it just looks so fluid and sexy.This is the same in spoken languages too, when reading “Grande DeCafe Caramel Machiato” it gives the reader (psychologically) a different imprssion of the item compred to “Medium cofee with some caramel in it and no caffeeene”. Which would you rather choose? Be honest d:I have put the advanced in quotes within the header becasue its not really advanced at all! It does the same thing!

 This post was inspired by the following line of code just written at work:

DateTime validateDate = DateTime.Parse(((TextBox)Page.Controls[0].FindControl(“ContentPlaceHolder1″).Controls[0].FindControl(sourceControl.ControlToValidate)).Text;