Getting my learn on.
With my boss for 2 weeks, I've taken it upon myself to recode most of our base software using C++ (which had been in C & IDL). They say you can only learn by doing, and so far it has been a wonderful experience. Not only is this fantastic work towards my resume and has allowed me to learn so many things (STL, the many uses of inheritance, truly implementing polymorphism, const correctness, templates, namespaces, forward definitions to eliminate circular dependencies... etc.) about a language that I thought I knew, but have used sparingly since college, that it is going to make the software so much more maintainable & reusable. Programs will integrate so much easier. The previous model had been for me to add functionality to existing code, which was poorly written (coded by physicists who seem to take joy in the suffering someone will have to endure to understand what they were writing). This approach inevitably leads to cruft (as well as inefficient programs) and I'm done maintaining it.
In addition to the C++ fun I'm having, I'm also learning about databases in my class at UMass. First off, I can immediately see where they are useful, and how I can redesign much of my code to use databases (where I previously used the filesystem, huge arrays, or classes). It'll be fun in the future, if I'm still here.
I had been really nervous about going back to school before this class. I'd been a pretty bad student and had detested classes. Now that I have internal motivation, rather than external, classes are so much more interesting. I have the experience now to learn the theory and see where it may apply, rather than just learning lots of theory, be given some toy examples in a half-hearted attempt to apply it, and getting so bogged down in the notation of the theory to truly comprehend what is going on. Having academics completely dissociated from the social aspects of school is another factor that's making my experience a much more pleasant experience. While it's fun to have those around you to study w/ , I'm finding that it is much more beneficial for me to be concentrating on the class rather than where we're going for beers after class. (jjharris1978 & kevin freedom... did you find the same thing? Although, you 2 never really had the academic troubles I did.)
In addition to the C++ fun I'm having, I'm also learning about databases in my class at UMass. First off, I can immediately see where they are useful, and how I can redesign much of my code to use databases (where I previously used the filesystem, huge arrays, or classes). It'll be fun in the future, if I'm still here.
I had been really nervous about going back to school before this class. I'd been a pretty bad student and had detested classes. Now that I have internal motivation, rather than external, classes are so much more interesting. I have the experience now to learn the theory and see where it may apply, rather than just learning lots of theory, be given some toy examples in a half-hearted attempt to apply it, and getting so bogged down in the notation of the theory to truly comprehend what is going on. Having academics completely dissociated from the social aspects of school is another factor that's making my experience a much more pleasant experience. While it's fun to have those around you to study w/ , I'm finding that it is much more beneficial for me to be concentrating on the class rather than where we're going for beers after class. (jjharris1978 & kevin freedom... did you find the same thing? Although, you 2 never really had the academic troubles I did.)