DevTopics is a high-level and sometimes satirical look at software development and computer technology. DevTopics is written by Tim Toady, the founder of Browserling Inc, a cross-browser testing company. When we occasionally dive into the details, it's usually about C# and .NET programming. (More)
Here’s a clever way to pre-screen candidates: post the job description in C# code. That’s what a company in Port Chester, New York did for a $80K-$100K .NET Developer position posted on CraigsList. The job description starts as:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
namespace CandidateSearchApp
{
class Program
{
static void Main( string[] args )
{
var candidateSearch = new CandidateSearch();
foreach (Candidate candidate in candidateSearch.GetCandidates())
{
if (candidate.IsViable() && candidate.IsQualified())
candidate.SubmitResume();
}
}
}
And the necessary qualifications are summarized as follows:
“I’m tellin ya, mo fos… I’ll bet my last clean diaper that C# is the best programming language there is.”
Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a programming poem. A BABY programming poem, no less! Apparently Google App Inventor is so easy that even an infant can build Android apps.
But back to the poem by Andra McCoy. Here is the first stanza:
Why does PHP and HTML sleep in the same crib, Whenever I look, they’re sharing a bib. They seem to support some code they call OOP, I find it irrelevant, more concerned with my Poop!
Any poem that contains both OOP and poop is true geek art in my book!
We label someone a “couch potato” if they spend too much time sitting on the couch watching TV. The boob tube consumes about half of America’s leisure time or nearly three hours per day.
But the amount of time people spend online and using computers is also increasing. Children spend an average of 89 minutes each day using a computer "for entertainment purposes," up from 62 minutes in 2004. Eighty percent of U.S. adults spend an average of 13 hours per week online, while 1 in 7 are online more for than 24 hours per week.
Marriam-Webster defines “mouse potato” as “a person who spends a great deal of time using a computer.” Although there is some debate about the future of the computer mouse — given the rise of non-mouse devices such as smartphones and tablets — “mouse potato” is a fitting term to describe our digital sloth selves.
It’s a standard movie cliché: A hacker pounds away on his keyboard for 30 seconds to break a military-grade encryption scheme. Nevermind that in real life it would take 8.4 million CPU years to factorize a 1024-bit number in software. (Although the days of total security with 1024-bit RSA are coming to an end.)
When the company asked the blonde why she had such a long password, she said the login screen required the password to be at least 8 characters long and include at least one capital.