457 WWDC08 Student Welcome

Community, Career & Coding

Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch

Friday, February 6, 2009

Three Topics
• Community
• Career
• Coding


Community


PSIG


PSIG
• TIP Start your own group
• “Programming Special Interest Group”
• Started in 1996
• Unbelievably naïve
• Undeniably the reason I’m standing in front of you today
• “Unprofessional” Format
Extremely welcoming and friendly
■

■ Roundtable

■ Everyone Shows & Tells

■ Think: Cheers but with Geeks

■ Easily function without a main presentation at all

Chronically late meeting notices
■


PSIG
• Advantages:
Developed presentation skills
■

Learned how to gently keep a meeting on-track. Kinda
■

Alpha-geek cred
■

Invaluable flailing
■

Camaraderie (Pizza Jaunt)
■

Professional give and take
■


Chicago Cocoaheads


Chicago CocoaHeads
• TIP You don’t have to start your own group
• Joined in 1999
Started by Bob Frank
■

Made C4 possible
■

Currently co-lead the group
■

Valuable lesson infiltrating a group & installing puppet regime
■

• TIP Volunteer to give talks
Highly valuable to frazzled organizers
■

■ 10 minute stand-up

■ What are you working on?

■ No need to be an expert


C4


C4
• Indie Mac conference
100th PSIG meeting; born in the ashes of MacHack
■

• Small
• Single-track
• Hand-picked presenters
• Tons of schmooze time
• Hack contest
• Assumed failure
• Nearly knifed the baby
• TIP do big things – just harden against worst-case


You, Superstar
• Know yourself
Is fame for you?
■

■ Prefer “man behind the curtain?”

• Build a reputation
Blog
■

■ Trademark

■ Meatspace and online groups

■ Join an open source project

■ Non-code:

Website, icons, design, UI
■

■ Documentation

■ Mailing list support


Let’s not call it Marketing
• A natural programmer aversion to marketing?
• Become famous enough so you can do Important Work
• You have a blog, right?
No, really
■

■ I mean it

• Blog:
Learning
■

■ Sample code

■ Small free apps

Walking resumé
■

• Control your “Google Image”


Community
• Online
Twitter, Facebook
■

■ Student Dev

■ Iron Coder

• Internet ≠ Meatspace substitute
WWDC, Bar Camp, iPhone Dev Camp, C4
■


Secret Societies
• Get enough of a (good) reputation, and you’ll get a call
• Kind of goes against common coder ideals
• Mostly harmless, just a desire for better Signal vs. Noise


Career


General Career Directions
• Big company
• Small company
• Aside: Apple’s hybrid structure
• Venture-backed Startup
• Indie
Mac and iPhone indie
■

■ Web indie

• Contractor/Consultant
• Live at home in parent’s basement


Going Indie
• Most romantic
• Spend “too much time” writing great software
• Best routes to indiehood:
Contracting
■

■ Big company (build up cash reserves and networking)

TIP beware intellectual property issues
■

Probably not traditional small company
■

■ Though indie small company rocks


Coding


Coding
• Non-negotiable: use version control
Even for your small personal projects you never intend to share
■

■ Changes the way you program

■ Sample code hacking

■ Probably use a popular modern DVCS (git, mercurial, bazaar)


Coding
• Use Assertions
Design-by-contract > assertions > unit testing
■

■ Automatic bug detection

• Understand Unicode
No such thing as “plain text”
■

■ Or cheat and just always use UTF-8 for everything


(Carpe diem) x 5
• TIP Network, network, network
Break out of your clique
■

■ Career fair tonight

■ Inter-session all week

■ After-hours parties

■ After-party pub crawls

■ Official beer bash

• Participate in Hands-on Sessions
• Bring a buggy project to the labs
• Get a human interface review
• TIP Go deep on a favorite tech
• TIP Start or Join a (Group|Project)


457 WWDC08 Student Welcome

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