Theory vs. Practice
“I know how to code,” I said, “but I don’t know how to Code.” “Umm. You just said the same thing twice and said there was a difference.” “Yes,” I said, “but I said it with different emphasis each time.” “Please explain.” So this was how I explained my frustrations to a sympathetic ear. See, I had dabbled and learned all sorts of programming languages: Basic, C, a little Java, Javascript, Scheme, a bit of 8086 assembly and even Zilog-80 assembly so I could try to make calculator games for my old TI. I’d also managed to learn enough HTML and CSS to hack up my personal blogger site. I mean, I know about For loops, If/Then statements, functions, objects, quick sorts, and so on. Despite all that, I was completely flummoxed if I wanted to make anything substantial or real. I didn’t know how to make standalone Windows executables, or set…
Soul Sucking Training
We all know there are plenty of issues with meetings in the workplace. And Allison Green over at Ask a Manager even did a piece on making sure your meetings are productive. But lately I’ve been thinking about another kind of work meeting: the training seminar. Whenever a procedure’s being changed ever poor engineer, planner, and specialist often has to sit through an hour of training to learn what the new process is. One of my major beefs is that often training is not customized. Sometimes you end up in the same room with individuals who use the software for hours every day to its full capabilities and others who are not familiar with it at all. The way a designer looks at software can be very different from the way someone in configuration or manufacturing might use that same software. One might be overly familiarized with a certain side…
Seeing the code in the machines – Indestructible software.
For many people they just except that software exist as some form of stuff that allows you do do things on computers or is hidden inside machines. In a way software can be as hard to physically get hold of as it is to see the flow of electronics in a wire or see the flow of air particles generating a vortex off a wing tip. However software is a important components in nearly everything you touch, from the mouse your scroll around the page with to the hundreds of servers that send you search results when looking for that next holiday. Software engineers are a massive part of the industry but what does software really do and can software really break? It would be difficult to explain software and how the flow of code works in a modern computer as they have become very complex machine. Instead its possibly…
Pro/E, My love-hate relationship
PTC’s Pro/Engineer (now called Creo Elements), in my humble opinion, is a terrible software. I say this as someone who used to have a lot of experience with it. I started using Pro/e during my UG freshman year. During my sophomore year, I started being a TA for the class. During that year and the following 3 years, I TA’ed between 4 and 8 sections of Pro/e (and Pro/e2 and Pro/e Wildfire), to hundreds of incoming freshman, getting to the point where I was going over the design lectures and the main prof for the class only showed up for tests. In general, being a TA and pseudo-lecturer gave me some good exposure to how lectures really work in college from the other perspective and it got me over my fear of public speaking. So the intangibles associated with the position were pretty good. But man, Pro/e is a terrible…