Joseph Hachey

Got the job!!!

Joseph Hachey — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 02:21:00 GMT

After three interviews, I was giving a job offer with GrantStream that I gratefully accepted.

By the third interview, the candidates were narrowed down to an experiences PHP developer and myself, a new graduate with mostly a MS .NET background and zero PHP experience. Originally, GrantStream only intended to hire one web developer, but they saw enough potential in me that they decided to hire both the experienced developer and myself.

The first thing I did after receiving the job offer was purchase 'Sam's Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL, and Apache in 24 hours'. The second thing I did was edit my grub.conf to default to FedoraCore 4 instead of XP Pro. I've got a lot to learn in the two short weeks before my start date!

I am a bit saddened that I have to give up .NET for PHP. I do still plan to attain my Microsoft Certified Professional Developer cert, but it may take me a bit longer to prepare seeing as I'll be coding PHP by day and C# by night.

Job Interview Jitters

Joseph Hachey — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 03:46:00 GMT

I am a fresh graduate of the Computer Programmer/Analyst Diploma program at Fleming College, and have been invited to my first software development job interview.

To be honest, I'm scared out of my wits! Does anyone have any recommendations or words of wisdom?

Also, they specifically asked me to bring a list of questions I would like to ask them. I've already thought of a few on my own, but does anyone else have any ideas of questions I could ask. Perhaps something that would help me stand out from the crowd?

I Got My Ticket!!!

Joseph Hachey — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 21:15:00 GMT

Outer space, here I come!!! Oh wait, it says just my name is traveling aboard!?! What a gyp!

Thank you, Bill Evjen, for the link.

My First Article...

Joseph Hachey — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 03:08:00 GMT

ASP.NET 2.0 Personal Website Starter Kit: Storing Pictures on Filesystem Instead of Database

Firefox on Steroids!

Joseph Hachey — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 01:49:00 GMT

I found this how-to article on ipKonfig.com:

How-to: Firefox on Steroids

I applied the 'hack' to Firefox 1.5, and I think I notice a bit of a difference. I guess I won't know for sure until I download NetBeans & JDK1.5 tomorrow morning.

Java-doc != Data Dictionary??

Joseph Hachey — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 23:47:00 GMT

Today, in COSC202H: Data Structures & Algorithm Design, I was finally handed back Assignment 1, which I submitted almost 2 months ago. The assignment was to implement a handful of different Hash Tables with differing insertion/collision resolution algorithms, and compare their performance (collisions & clustering) when giving the same test cases.

In the marking scheme, I noticed 5% was deducted for not including a “Data Dictionary” with the documentation. This annoyed me as the assignment handout requested “Program and Testing Documentation”. Nowhere did it specifically mention a Data Dictionary. I did, however, write javadoc-formatted in-line documentation for all my classes, functions, and member variables, which compiled out to a very nice HTML API that was handed in with the source code and binaries.

When I argued to the professor that my java-docs met the requirements of a Data Dictionary, he quickly scanned through my printed-out code listings and asked: “Show me where you define the variable 'probeCount'”. I said, “okay...so the java-docs don't define local variables, but I have good naming conventions!”. He snickered and replied: “That's what all you students say: Sir, I use good naming conventions. Isn't that enough? Wait until you get into the real world and have to maintain a system consisting of tens of thousands of lines of code without a Data Dictionary before you ask if proper naming conventions is enough!”

Since when did a local variable's scope span across thousands of lines of code!?! I already defined every class's member variables. Is it really necessary to write a document that includes definitions for every single local variable in every function? I'm sure anyone who reads the code could make an inference that probeCount is used to count the number of probes! If you couldn't figure it out from the variable's name, scanning down a few lines you would notice that within a loop, probeCount is incremented every time a probe is made. Maybe that would give it away? Should I have written definitions for i, j, and k too? But I use those same three variable names for loop indexers in more than one function. Should I qualify them by function name and define each instance?

If there's one think I hate, it's make-work projects!

My Awkward OO Presentation

Joseph Hachey — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:29:00 GMT

Today, in my COSC362: Object-oriented Analysis & Design class, I gave a presentation on encapsulation. Actually, the assignment was to critique a flawed system design given to us by the professor. It was a group project, but my section focused on encapsulation. Below are my relevent slides:

At the end of my talk, I took a quick survey of the room and noticed that most of my peers had funny looks on their faces. Also, throughout the rest of the presentations, I noticed nobody made reference to Interfaces at all.

Was my talk over their heads? Was I wrong to relate Interfaces to the concept of encapsulation? Did the code scared them?

2 down...N to go!

Joseph Hachey — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 08:53:00 GMT

I have started work on a new personal project, ResumeSpammer. ResumeSpammer will do just what its name implies, spam my resume. Contact info of potential employers will be stored in a SQL Express database. For each employer, the application will populate my resume document (.doc) with their contact information and email it to them. There's a bit more to the project than that, but that's the just of it.

Today I wrote HacheyORG.ResumeSpammer.Logic.Resume, a class to handle populating and saving my resume with an employer's contact info. To interact with MS Word, I had to use its Primary Interop Assembly (PIA) It was my first time using Interop Assemblies, and it wasn't enjoyable in the least! I better get comfortable with interops, cause I'm sure I'll run into them again.

One hurdle I ran into was not being able to have one MS Word bookmark point to multiple locations in the document. This would have come in very handy for fields such as RecipientName, which appear multiple times in the cover letter. As a workaround, I gave each bookmark location a unique name (ie RecipitentName1, RecipientName2, etc.) and wrote a function that will detect if there are mutliple bookmarks and loop over them.

Yesterday I wrote HacheyORG.Lib.MailService, a class that utilizes System.Net.Mail to send emails with optional attachments through a SMTP server. In my case, I wanted to send emails through GMail's SMTP server. I had quite a bit of trouble figuring it out, so I'll post the code for reference. This snippet should work for Yahoo!Mail and HotMail as well, you will just need to figure out their servers' hostname and port.


 
 using (MailMessage message = new MailMessage(from, to, subject, body))
{

message.IsBodyHtml = false;
SmtpClient mailClient = new SmtpClient();
mailClient.Host = "smtp.gmail.com";
mailClient.Port = 587;
mailClient.EnableSsl = true;
mailClient.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(username, password);

mailClient.Send(message);

}