Eat the Dogfood

I try to practice what I preach, eat my own dogfood so to speak. In my rambling "Help Yourself", I wrote that you should regularly do stuff to sharpen your geek-foo. It's already 3 days into a new year and I haven't yet chanted a resolution (why mess with perfection?) or set new personal goals. I'm over due.

AnotherRandomDay.com

Ok, so here we go. This year, my goals are:

• Learn a new language. This is do-able. I added Groovy last year. This year will be either Erlang or Python. Probably Python or more likely Jython. When learning a new language, it doesn't count unless you do something with it. So this goal includes learning and then coming up with a project to implement.
  

• Fly my r/c airplane. I bought a Firebird Phantom plane and was ready to fly. My wife accidentally broke it before I got the chance. I will fix and fly it this year. Then I'll return to Chris Anderson's DIY UAV website and start dreaming again.
  

• Attend seminars. This is tough because my town is lacking in the free stuff. I'm going to keep an eye out for anything interesting in Indianapolis or even Chicago or Detroit. Here a local one that I will attend in April "Managing Like a Prince: What Machiavelli Teaches Us".
  

• Take and complete the free Performance, Monitoring and Management, Testing, and Debugging of Java Applications. I've taken other free "courses" on the Java passion site and they've been great. This one is currently on hold until Sang Shin has time to start it up. Even if the class doesn't start, I will at least read thru the material that is ready on the site.
  

• Re-read Charles Petzold's Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. I'm kinda cheating on this goal because I've already started this (but not until yesterday so I'm still counting it for this year). This is a great book that I read a few summers ago and ended up just skimming thru the later chapters. This time, I'm reading it all.
  

• Do a 7 in Seven and blog each one. 7 in Seven is an audacious scheme by the ITP Resident Researchers to do seven creative projects in seven days. My projects will be code and hardware related involving a bot or something similar. Yeah, I'm already doing that stuff but this time I'll have a deadline for each one.

• Volunteer. I will participate in a city trash cleanup or house painting or leaf raking or ... I'll keep my eye out for opportunities posted on bulletin boards and will help where I can. My time is limited with a non-stop job and a busy family but I can't use those as excuses. I'm also very fortunate with a decent income and my health. I need to help others more.
  

• Lose 10 pounds. This is the 3rd year in a row with this goal. 3 years ago, I actually gained a few, 2 years ago I stayed the same, last year I lost 5 pounds. This year, I'm doing it. I run a lot. I just eat more than I should. Check out the great recipes I have bookmarked on Delicious. yum. None are low-fat or diet. This will be my toughest goal.

I have other things in mind but these are the ones I'm committing to. I regularly read a few books (mostly fiction) each week so adding "read more" isn't a goal, it's a fact. I'd really like to take a few college course this year but that's not practical because of my insane work schedule. I just can't commit to a semester long obligation.

I'd love to hear your geek goals. What will you be doing to Help Yourself?

Education 02 - Help Yourself

The boss called the other day and told me about an applicant that didn't fit any of our open job reqs. She had experience but it was from several years back. I think she had taken time off to be a stay-at-home mom or something like that. He called to ask for ideas to suggest to applicants in similar situations. Rather than just saying "thanks, but no go", he wants to give suggestions to how they could help themselves. And then say "thanks, but no".

What can applicants do to make themselves more employable when they don't have recent experience? What can they do to show potential employers that they still are technically sharp and that they have employable skills?

A few months back, I ranted about how so many engineers fail to maintain their edge. I whined that there's so many free options that people can use to self-educate themselves and stay sharp yet they do nothing. So when the boss asked if I had any ideas, I said "sure, I have a few opinions".

Of course, every good geek should be doing what I'm suggesting below, but my main point of this writing is to emphasize that if you're looking for a job, you need to show the employer that you're active in the field, that you care and are willing to go the extra mile.

• Read Technical Books. Don't just sit in front of the television, night after night watching another stupid reality show. Go to a bookstore. Go to your library. Search Google for eBooks. I usually ask interviewees "tell me about the last few books that you've read". I had one guy say "Harry Potter". That in itself wasn't bad but when I asked "anything else?", he had nothing. We didn't hire him. Not because he read Harry Potter, he just didn't show me that he cared about "bettering himself".
  


• Take Free College Courses. Many many colleges are now sharing webcast/podcasts of great courses. Here's a very small selection. Just search and you'll find gobs.
  


• 105 Free College Lectures


• Linux Open CourseWare
  

• Online Science Courses


• UC Berkeley Webcasts


• Ivy League Open Courseware


• Join a User Group. Many cities have a Linux User Group (LUG) or a Java User Group (JUG) or a whatever. My small city even has a 2600 meeting - not sure if I'd put that on my resume but the people that you meet are definitely interesting.
  


• Contribute to an open source project. Search the SourceForge help wanted system and join a project.
  


• Subscribe to Tech Related Websites. Add tech site's RSS feeds to your favorite reader so you can stay current with the latest poop. A few of my daily must reads are dzone, and Artima. Look over there on the left side of the blog and you'll see a few other good ones.
  


• Attend Seminars. There's bound to be seminars in your area that are free or next to free. Check out your local college. Pick up a continuing education catalog. Google for "free seminar". And while you're at the seminar, talk to the person sitting next to you. Be social. Besides learning something neat, you may run into a potential employer or meet someone who can tell you about an opportunity.
  

• Write a blog. Your blog doesn't need to be super tech-geek. It doesn't need to be competition to Joel on Software. It just needs to be a place to capture your thoughts - technical, non-tech, geek, life, whatever. Just write. Share a piece of code, write about a movie you just saw. Anything that keeps you involved. The blog doesn't even need to have readers (as evidenced by Buck Up Chinny). Just write.
  

• Do a 7 in 7. Identify 7 mini-projects that can each be completed in a day. And then do 'em. As you complete each, do a short write-up to document what you did and what challenges you encountered. Better yet, blog about each project. Each project can be something easy, just make it a challenge. Make an LED blink. Convert a table based webpage to CSS layout. Interface something to an Arduino Nano.

Just do something and talk about it at the job interview. Show passion when describing it. If you don't care about what you do, I surely won't.

Stay Sharp - Free College Courses

I'm really floored when I hear about the lack of reading and self-help effort that the average engineer does after graduating. I recently saw a survey that showed most engineers read one technical book per year. Wow. That's incredible - how can an engineer survive? I know, some (most?) will say that they get their info on the web and who has time to read a book? But didn't you become an engineer because you have that drive to learn, to make things better? What happened?

I'll never forget a meeting about 12 years ago with department heads and the VP of Engineering. The topic was upgrading the office PCs from Windows 3.11 to this thing called Windows 95. We had the budget to upgrade but no funds for user training. I was an unknown geek at the time and spoke up "Why don't we buy a few books and let the users learn on their own? Windows 95 isn't very difficult". The VP glared at me and said "These people are adults, we can't expect them to learn on their own". Floored. I was absolutely floored by his comment. I kept my mouth shut and the company stayed with Windows 3.11 for another two years. That experience though has stuck with me. Too many adults think they need a training class for everything. Very few are willing to try a new application on their own. Is it fear of failure?

This fear also stops many from bettering themselves by taking random college classes at local schools. I love to look thru the current catalog and see if I can fit in a class. Last year I took a robotics class and an advanced design patterns class. My job will pay for tuition if the class is even remotely related to my job. And if a passing grade is obtained. I know a few engineers that won't take a class because if they don't pass, then they're out of the bucks. What an attitude. Take the class, participate, learn, and it's darn near impossible to not pass.

I'm trying to encourage people at work to take a few of the free web classes that many great schools are sharing. I know a few guys (including me) that have recently taken the excellent Java Passion on-line courses. I've been saving off the links to these web classes in my del.icio.us education tag but now that I've stumbled across Online Education Database's wrap-up post Skip the Tuition: 100 Free Podcasts from the Best Colleges in the World and 200 Free Online Classes to Learn Anything, I think I have enough to keep me busy.

For the past year or so, I've trying to watch/listen to at least two class sessions a week of the various free web courses. This isn't hard to do. I rarely watch or listen to one straight thru. Usually start one late at night and then finish it in bits and pieces over the next day or so. The key is just do it and make it fit into what time I have available. Right now, I'm doing a few from MIT's Aircraft System Engineering course which was put together by shuttle astronaut and MIT Professor Jeff Hoffman and Professor Aaron Cohen, who was the Space Shuttle Orbiter Project Manager.

Many people have said to me "I'm too busy, how can you find the time to do those?" I always want to reply "How can you afford not to?"

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