Job GET! (and some short book reviews)
Like I mentioned in a previous post, I got my Master’s degree earlier this year. Since then I’ve been taking some courses at the University while looking for a nice place to work. In other words, I’ve mostly been slacking around 
About two months ago I decided to browse through a Swedish job database and found an opening as a programmer at Interactive Institute: Sonic Studio which seemed quite cool. I sent in my CV, went on some interviews and finally signed the hiring papers about 1-2 weeks ago. My first day on the job is about a week from now, and I’m really looking forward to it.
Since Sonic Studio is positioned in PiteÃ¥ which is about 50km from LuleÃ¥ (where I live) by car, I’m currently browsing for a decent used car to purchase. This sucks quite a lot since my knowledge in cars is pretty much limited to knowing where the motors and wheels are positioned, but hopefully I’ll be able to work this out since the other option is taking the bus which leaves me with about thirty less minutes sleep in the mornings.
Otherwise I’ve done a bunch of small stuff during the latest months. Among other things, I started coding on a game-engine for shoot-em-up development since I’ve been wanting to build one of those for some time, and I felt the need to brush up on my C++ after doing a bunch of Java and Python development. This is pretty much just a pet-project that I’ve been playing around with occasionally when I get bored, an early proof of concept video is available here in case someone would be interested in that.
I’ve also been reading a bunch of nerd-literature. Since I’ve played around a bit with C++ again, I finally decided to read through Thinking in C++ which helped me brush up on my syntax, among other things. In my opinion, it is a pretty great book for learning and improving ones skills in C++ but I haven’t really read any other books about the language to compare it to.
When I finished up that book, I started with The Pragmatic Programmer which has been on my “to read list” for some time. The book is essentially a list of tips for developing software, where some of them might seem obvious but others actually forces you to rethink your development process. One of them which I know that I’ve made myself guilty of occasionally is the tip they call “Leave no broken windows”. The real world example given in the book is a car that is left in the streets. The car can be left alone for quite some time but once the first window is destroyed, the rest of the car is usually plundered and vandalized within a short span of time. The same hold true for software, and I have personally ignored small bugs to find them come back with friends later on to torture me. Once you start compromising your code quality, it usually snowballs and gets worse quite fast.
It touches a lot on the non-programming aspects of development as well, such as making sure that you gather the correct requirements for you project and use proper tools such as revision control. Of course there are a lot of other great tips in the book as well, and I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone who are involved with development of software.
Finally I’ve read a new book on lighttpd. As I’ve written previously in the blog, I’ve migrated most of my web-stuff from Apache to lighttpd and I couldn’t be more pleased. Setting up lighttpd is a lot easier than setting up Apache, so you wont really need a book for it but I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who either wants a good guide for setting it all up or just tuning an existing installation. It covers a wide arrange of topics including setup, encryption, DOS-protection and migration from other web servers. All in all, it isn’t an essential book for anyone who wants to run an lighttpd-installation but I’d recommend it since it beats the online resources in readability.
Programming & scripting, Python, Uninteresting, Web development
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