Vox Hunt: Victory!
Vox Hunt: I Get Around
Show us your favorite mode of transport.
Submitted by NomDeCocon.
QotD: Things I’m Truly Passionate About
What are the things in life that you're truly passionate about?
Submitted by Jess.
From now and for the foreseeable future, Climate Crisis and Atheism.
18 Years
One of the things that I don't boost about in close company (or any for that matter) is my athletic ability. Thanks to a near British public school education in Hong Kong (wiki), I was taught to play in many sports. And I don't mean just played it once or twice in P.E. classes. I mean I know the rules, the techniques, and know enough on how to play as to not make a fool of myself in front of regular players. Track running (100m and 200m sprints, 110m hurdles, 400m), cross-country running (15 km run), swimming (all the different stroke types with breast stroke being my strongest, while I can never master butterfly), basketball, volleyball, badminton, table tennis, and tennis.
Out of all these sports, my love remains tennis throughout the years. Thanks to my mum's foresight, she signed me up for tennis lessons (ran by the Hong Kong Tennis Association) when I was still young (~1988 and before the Michael Chang phenomenon). After a few years of continuous tennis lessons every Sunday I was good enough to be the school's tennis team captain but emigrating to UK in 1990 put a very short end to that. And Britain, being the birthplace of tennis and Wimbledon, is actually very difficult to get access to tennis training for a non-privileged (read non-public school) Chinese teenager. So I more or less gave up playing tennis as a serious sport. I did not play tennis regularly (i.e. more than once a year type regular) until I've moved to NY and my friend T.J. wanted to play tennis a few years back.
My skill did not really improved with age (as I always secretly hoped) and was pretty much stuck at being a 2.5 player (NTRP Rating). This year though, I was determined to improve and after playing the first time I hit an epiphany! The racket that I have been using since 1991, the Wilson Pro Staff Classic, was a great racket. It was used by Jim Courier, etc. but it was so the wrong racket for me. It was too head heavy and thus requires way more power to generate racket head speed for spins. Heavy head also means it is more difficult to react to shots such as return of serve or volley.
So just over three months ago I tried out three new rackets, one Wilson, one Head, and one Volkl. Of the three, I was pinning my hope of the Volkl since I've played them before when I picked the racket for T.J. To cut the long story short, I discovered that I liked the feel of the Wilson most even though it was added to the list of rackets to try out as an afterthought. And to my complete surprise, it was the Wilson that gave me the best all round feel. I was able to make shots that normally would either mean too long/wide or into the net. Suddenly I was able to swing freely and think about where I want to hit the shot, rather than whether I can even hit the ball back to other side of the court.
Anyway, after a bunch of lessons and playing in a tennis league every Monday for the last three months, I am now easily playing at 3.5 level. And on a good day, I can be a 4.0 player! Only take me 18 years to get here but better late than never I guess!
Self-improvement
One of the responsibility of being a manager is that I have to do job interviews. Our team is on the constant look out for new developers to join our team, partly due to pressure from upper management to staff up for some mythical project that may or may not materialise in the immediate future, but really we want to increase the team's overall skill level by hiring better developers, replacing the lesser skilled ones.
Unfortunately finding good developers is not as easy as one may think despite the large number of available candidates out there. Competent programmers are plenty but good, if not great, developers who are not only good at programming but also able to see the big picture, able to visualise the problem domain space and devise solution that not only solve the problem but also fit with the design, seem very rare indeed.
Most of what we've encountered thus far are mostly the competent type with only a very selected few exceptional developers (we hired them as fast as we could, of course). We organise our interview very much with that in mind. Unlike some of the interviews I had taken myself before, we don't ask the candidate technical/code-related questions. We generally take it for granted that if the candidate has been working in the industry for over 5 years, s/he knows how to code. Rather, we ask the candidates about their views on programming paradigm debates; OO vs. procedural, static typed language vs. dynamically typed language, and business logic in code vs. database, etc.
For example, one of the question that we always ask the candidates is what books have they read that change how they feel about programming or how they see the discipline. The question looks innocent enough and generally we ask the candidates about three quarter way into the interview so most of them don't pay much attention. 8 times out of 10, they would answer with the usual collection of 'how-to' book titles: "Programming with C#", "ASP.NET programming", etc. A few, in fact, did not read any software-related books at all. I don't know about the other manager but if I get that kind of answers, that candidate has just lost the job. Reading 'how-to' books, in my opinion, does not improve ones skill as a developers. Sure the book teaches how to solve problems with a specific language using specific tools, but skills like that can always be learnt in a few weeks if required. Rather, we are looking for candidates that want to elevate themselves from being just a programmer to a more rounded developer. The kind of books that we hope the candidates have read are high level books such as Code Complete, Refactoring to Patterns, etc.
Unfortunately, almost none of the candidates we interviewed read this type of books. This left me and the other manager very puzzled because surely there are outstanding developers out there, looking for jobs. Are they so contented with their current job that most of them are not on the job market? Perhaps because if I were the company who has one of them in my team, I'll do a lot to keep him around.
Or are most programmers out there satisfy with their skills set and are not looking to become a better developers? Is this why most software development projects fail? Do all these big corporations out there realise that they are not getting what they are paying for? Is this why we, the software developers, are still not considered a profession like lawyers or doctors despite the complex skills that we need to develop highly intricate software system?
Lost in Colonisation 