tom_b

50 ms·

361.
by tom_b 16y ago
I'd be super-interested in hearing what that's like from a hacker point-of-view. Is it a big team? Are you doing standard IT work there or far-out, complex coding? If you're a hacker there, what's the skinny on fun problems in the day-to
362.
by tom_b 16y ago
Nicely done and much more in-depth than I expected. I generally find that I don't need to spend much time dealing deeply with query planners, low hanging fruit is quite easy enough to find in the enterprise db world (what, no index . . . ba
363.
by tom_b 16y ago
Same here. Definite pickup in recruiter spam as well. Hard decision coming re: lifestyle freedom vs tech challenge and career growth. Hopefully, the more general job market will be picking up.
364.
by tom_b 16y ago
Used to be about 20% in starting salary at big firms . . . :-) From the other side of the table, it's probably a reasonable filter - you had to love CS enough to go on to grad school in the first place, you probably had to do enough hard im
365.
by tom_b 16y ago
A little flaky perhaps, but if you're gonna love sql :-) select distinct cnt, count(cnt) over (partition by cnt) from ( select 'a' usr,1 cnt from dual union select 'b' usr,1 cnt from dual union select 'c' usr,2 cnt from dual union selec
366.
by tom_b 16y ago
Thanks for weighing in - I am a somewhat frequent visitor to your blog and websites. This type of discussion (eg, using uncommon or less well-known languages to be more productive or reason about an approach to a problem domain) comes up h
367.
by tom_b 16y ago
K, J, Lisp, Prolog . . . I'm beginning to be worried about my own fascination with uncommon languages. Is there a support group available? If the three books you read when the kids are asleep are The Reasoned Schemer, The Art of Prolog, an
368.
by tom_b 16y ago
Any comments on dev work on older laptops with lightweight Linux distros? I have a IBM T23 Thinkpad with 384MB of memory. I took Arch for a spin and was happy for awhile, recently made a move to Xubuntu, but neither have been exactly the r
369.
by tom_b 16y ago
I worked at a previous job for about 1.5 years with the engineer and had subjected her to what must have been a terrible interview back then. Timing worked in my favor - her contract wasn't renewed by the company she was working at when I
370.
by tom_b 16y ago
Your "not specific to a domain" part scares me. I currently work with two extremely talented people with completely different backgrounds - one is a top-notch, get it done engineer, the other a smart startup minded person who has a MBA (do
371.
by tom_b 16y ago
I've worked in enterprise software dev and testing, a big financial corp, on a small bioinformatic data export contract project, and now in a bioinformatics group in a pure research setting where the focus is on the science and not on progr
372.
by tom_b 16y ago
I think a code sample is really just a launching point for a discussion. Some people would probably use a resume the exact same way. When I've offered code samples to hiring managers, what I've tried to do is demonstrate technical mastery
373.
by tom_b 16y ago
I think a large number of programming jobs aren't - this is how we wind up with such a mind-numbing process for both job seeker and hiring organization. I have interviewed at a number of places where the job description would have led you t
374.
by tom_b 17y ago
IBM is so funny. There are large incentives to get patents there as an employee. Prior to when I left and went to another company, there were even expectations that senior level engineers would regularly generate patents and patentable wo
375.
by tom_b 17y ago
Strongly seconded - I started with The Art of Prolog a few months ago and also enjoyed it. Having seen both, I think I'll probably go through the Reasoned Schemer and then return to the Art of Prolog.
376.
by tom_b 17y ago
K, upvoted simply for mentioning The Reasoned Schemer, a book that I'm having great fun simply picking up occasionally. Time to really start cranking on it.
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by tom_b 17y ago
This is actually a key insight - you need to actually do a little bit of experimenting when you get into software performance. Politically, you can run into weird "ownership" issues (eg, the DBA team handles system performance) and fighting
378.
by tom_b 17y ago
For those of us who lack graphical intuition (I'm guilty), look to Stephen Few (who looks to Mr. Tufte) for best ways to visualize business (and scientific) data.
379.
by tom_b 17y ago
Interesting - our hospital written policy is that SSNs must be encrypted when stored. Other PII is somewhat less restrictive. But, we had a high-profile case where a server with a file of SSNs and patient names was hacked. There was no ev
380.
by tom_b 17y ago
HTTPS. Firewall that prevents outside network access to servers with HIPPA data. Encryption of data in the db (eg, don't store plaintext social security numbers in a table). All backups are encrypted. Files with PII (patient identifying
381.
by tom_b 17y ago
Sure, grab one of the data warehouse books from Kimball. Inmon is the other big data warehouse author out there, but I'm not as familiar with his texts. Kimball's stuff is an easy read and not platform focused in any way. If you are aimin
382.
by tom_b 17y ago
Do you need your system to be transaction-oriented (think ATMs and banking) or analytic (for doing slice and dice reporting of data)? You'll do well to check out normalization for the first and understand star schemas for the second. It's
383.
by tom_b 17y ago
Or just put your resume out there to jobs that seem like good fits. I recently had a very odd interview experience where despite offering multiple times to provide references (and code samples) I was never asked for either. And got a prett
384.
by tom_b 17y ago
Check out the Taulbee survey numbers to get more meaningful information on what CS PhD employment is like.
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by tom_b 17y ago
Minimal application development environments like this are great fun to read about. The attitudes in this paper reminded me some of things I read from Arthur Whitney. I sometimes wonder if we are moving back in the programming world to the
386.
by tom_b 17y ago
I'm trying to approach it from a slightly different angle (although pmiller2 alludes to it): When you know that a language is absolutely the wrong choice for a problem, you are probably there. When you can hold a problem in your head, use t
387.
by tom_b 17y ago
Caught this question only after a few days, sorry for the delay. We actually are using Oracle (we have a site license).
388.
by tom_b 17y ago
This is not directly related to your question, but as someone who stepped from the corporate world to the non-profit world (medical research center affiliated with university hospital), I can say the pay is lower but the freedom is greater.
389.
by tom_b 17y ago
Believe it or not, Pentaho is what we have in place right now. For the ETL backend, I think it is a really nice tool. Flexible, intuitive, and measures up well to Informatica and other $$$ tools. But the reporting model, with the designer
390.
by tom_b 17y ago
Yeah, I think about that enterprise software RFS as well. I'm working on a data warehouse for a bioinformatics research center right now, so we are somewhat playing in the same place. Can you share what third party software you're using?

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