Steven Yong's Weblog

A friend of mine has been asking me a few times why did I abandon a stable job and join a small size local company but I didn't seem to satisfy him with any valid answer. Actually he is not the only one who thinks I've made a wrong decision, even some of the colleagues currently working with me do think like him. For the sake of helping the company to find more really good developers, I've been trying very hard to persuade him for joining our workforce. Before making him to believe it'll be good for him for working at the company, I think I must first convince him that big company is not as stable as he might think and it isn't necessarily that the big one has fewer problems (those that upset him) than the small one.
I happened to know that I was the first one in the Java team who left the company ever since the team started growing, but I didn't hesitate to leave because I didn't know what was I doing the works for. I got to know from a former colleague that there's more and more people leaving and even she would be leaving soon. I apologize if I still couldn't make you clear about the reason I quitted as I didn't have a solid one. Nevertheless, I do have many many small pieces in this blog which you might link them together becoming a long answer. If you want a short one, what I all can tell now is:

Life is too short for doing anything meaningless

Hopefully he will have an answer for himself soon.

I just came to understand why local programmers prefer to write code right before there is any specification available. Since last week I've been appointed as a part-time Java tutor for a college student, I'm trying very hard to convince him to at least list down every feature he wants to do. When he told me that his lecturer can't wait to see a simple working program and the documentation is only required to be submitted after the program finished, I felt very upset on the way his lecturer guides the students. I just got a call from the student's father asking me to teach his son start writing code right away the next session, I immediately became tired on this, but I was unable to tell a person who says "prototype" as "protocol" (he said his son's lecturer wants to see a "protocol" first) that his son didn't even know what is Servlet and yet he's going to build a web application.
Last week I interviewed a few fresh graduates but I didn't ask much about technical because what I'm most interested to know are how much they like programming and how much they remember what they have learnt. But most of them disappointed me that in way what they're looking for is just, a pay job.
For those who's fresh and looking for a job, please get yourself fully understand the chapter 3, 11 and 12 of J2EE Tutorial before applying any Java position.

When you output your debug statements (stderr and stdout, in Java which is System.err and System.out respectively) to a file, do take I/O buffering into consideration. You may not see your output lines in the sequence you expect if your program is performing buffered I/O to files.