February 10, 2011 Book Reviews, Certification, Success No comments
February 10, 2011 Book Reviews, Certification, Success No comments
Training Kit
Exam 70-561: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ADO.NET Application Development
You can see my transcript using this information:
https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx
Transcript ID: 904316
Access Code: andriybuday
Nearest certification plans
January 26, 2011 English, Success 4 comments
I attended English courses in my company for about 9 months. For this time I learnt a lot of new stuff, and revisited whole bunch of grammar. Also I slightly increased my vocabulary.
I’ve mentioned many times that English courses are very important for outsourcing company and for me particularly. I even described one of the lessons and recommended some activities to do to learn English.
So this is very good result, but unfortunately my average score is about 80%, so I might not be eligible for next free of charge course. But honestly I do not hurry for being English course’s student for another 9 months. It makes me tired… because I have to allocate additionally 4-5 hours per week and as usual I rob it from my sleep hours. I think that the next most needed thing for me is to practice more and more. Actually I even planned to find someone who would like to talk with me in English all the time. Not my girl – she is more German expert and weak in English, and not my best friend – he is too shy or smth..
January 21, 2011 Certification, Success 8 comments
That happened! Passing this exam was the main stone on my road to MCPD Enterprise.
How did I prepare?
I already mentioned that I prepared as usual by reading training kit. But this time I did most of the Labs, because I have really little experience in Web Development.
Honestly for me ASP revealed to be very simple for understanding and easy to work with. I guess because it intersects with other technologies and also because I have more or less good dev experience in other areas.
Also I did not concentrate on learning ASP.NET extremely well. We all know that nothing with ViewState and other aspects of it are now history. ASP MVC should be technology number one for learning web, but I had to pass this exam. Also understanding what is under MVC and from what it all started is good.
Passing Exam
Exam has 45 questions for about 3 hours. I hated answering them. They were long to read and extremely boring. I HATE THIS EXAM QUESTIONS. 2 screens of question is too much, it kills.
I PASSED EXAM with score 907, woot!
You can see my transcript using this information:
https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx
Transcript ID: 904316
Access Code: andriybuday
January 8, 2011 Success, YearPlanReport 9 comments
So time for new year resolution has came.
I created similar list last year and wrote why I really think that having list of things you want to do during the year is very important. I listened to many of time management books, especially I like those recommendations that includes all aspects of the life.
Accordingly that their point of view life consists with following set of aspects: health, relations, finances, emotions, work. If at least one of this aspects lame you wouldn’t enjoy your life entirely since other aspects will suffer. I found that in recent time I neglected my health. Yeah, I’m young so I do not feel myself completely crappy, but anyway I don’t like situation in which I’m now. That is why I’m planning to have some activities in list that should help me with my health. In this country you have to work half of your life to get apartments to live in… wtf? yeah, that’s truth, so there have to be some better ways to earn more money, not only sweatshoping work. To enjoy my life it would be perfect to travel abroad with middle-low budget.
Here below is my resolution list for 2011
(list above is not ordered in any way…)
Do you have your plan for this year? If you don’t better think about it, because “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.
Ok list looks large but fair enough to achieve this in year term. Thank you for reading my resolutions and please share yours!
January 5, 2011 Revision of my activity, Success, YearPlanReport No comments
So the list I had in the beginning of 2010:
Next thing I will create blog post “Where do you want to be in a Year?” for the 2011.
Till next time.
November 27, 2010 Certification, Success, WCF 3 comments
I recent posts I mentioned that I read training kit for ms WCF exam. Of course I did this for some reason. I had this exam scheduled for yesterday as well as presentation on WCF for Thursday, which went extremely well. All that was scheduled because I decided to throw myself out of comfort zone. I now can ensure you that this approach indeed works. So, if you want to achieve something don’t hesitate – just go ahead and put some deadlines for yourself, and make them visible to others so this will be controlling your activity.
How did I prepare?
So I’m completely sure that positive result of this exam was guaranteed by my experience working with WCF. But anyway I read training kit, which brought many interesting aspects and some kind of hints for the exam. Third learning source (after experience and training kit) was MSDN and writing simple applications by my own. I do not like to use examples from training kit, also I found few mistakes in kit. Thursday’s presentation on WCF helped me as well, I strengthen my knowledge in transactions and instancing. Just before exam I tried MeasureUp demo test and got 6 out 6 – never got this at MeasureUp for other exams.
Passing Exam
Exam has 45 questions for 120 min. And I liked answering for them, since I faced dozen of questions related to what I do in my everyday work.
I PASSED EXAM with score 918, this means that I answered correctly on 41 questions. Woo hoo!
You can see my transcript using this information:
https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx
Transcript ID: 904316
Access Code: andriybuday
November 8, 2010 Opinion, Success 2 comments
Some time ago I twitted “To be successful throw yourself out of comfort zone”. I had this idea long time ago, but did not write about it. I see that I have to post something about this, since I’m becoming lazy and I do not like this at all.
Fascinating Uncle Bob
Yesterday I listened Uncle Bob’s thoughts on “Pragmatic Podcast”. (Who doesn’t know Uncle Bob is Robert Martin). That was “fascinating”, he is “fascinating” person and I was inspired by this episode. He has that much energy after being in computer field for about 40 years he is still interesting in everything new. He talks about new and old programming languages he understands software development deeply. What inspired me the most is his attitude to all of this and his bright energetic view on programming. He reads science fiction, rides his bicycle every day and has extended family. This all helps him be in good shape. I would recommend to listen to this podcast – just download and listen when you have time.
Yesterday I complained to my girlfriend about my situation and not satisfaction of what I’m doing now. She stated that I do not have enough activities outside of my work. Yes, but my blog is my 3-rd place where I’m trying to find myself. But I also did not post lot in recent time. This means that something is wrong. So here in this post I would like to talk a bit about this “something wrong”.
Finishing tasks in latest moment
I guess this is not a big secret that many people tend to do everything in the last moment. Working in the last moment is hard, but very productive. Many of us extremely enjoy when they have finished something well and when in the last moment you triumph. I had many of such moments and they made me happy.
Of course there are techniques called “time management” where ideologists try to address this issue. At least in one of the techniques it is mentioned about separating all the tasks you have to do into 4 sets. The most important and best known is one where you have important but not immediate tasks. Books on management recommend to work in this set continuously time to time and soon you will have all tasks that are important but not immediate completed before it is becoming hot. What can I say about this idea? It is indeed good and awesome, but it doesn’t work for me at all, and probably it doesn’t work for many of us.
In recent time I had some posts talking about my future plans, like reading 24 book till end of the year, passing couple of ms exams, becoming senior developer, etc. Yeah, I did huge portion of these, but there is only two months left till the end of year and I still wait for the latest moment when I can pass yet another milestone. For example I’m reading training kit for wcf exam and it goes so slowly that you cannot even imagine. But when I had exam on winforms and I knew that only 1 month is left to it and reading was much more rapid. Same shall be done to wcf exam, I think. Just schedule and this will force me to read and train. Today I gonna schedule my exam for the end of this month.
We have to make us busy
Many of us are very busy at work, we are even often working from home. This is tremendously helpful in moving forward in your career and if this is accordingly to your plan, you are fine. But I guess you have too many other plans that you would love to accomplish. Where do you have them located? In list with lowest priorities? Not written somewhere at all? Anyway unless you have some deadline for task X you are not really hurrying to accomplish it. If you have also tasks Y and Z and you see them “nice to have” you probably will not do them since X will be done in latest moment. What about Y and Z then?
So what do I propose to do? Have external visibility of your progress. If you are person with high responsibility you will do your best to accomplish all of your tasks because you are sure that others keep an eye on you. In my case I can schedule exam and write blog post on this. I will know that you readers are keeping eye on my. Even if this is not so important for you, it is very important for me.
Doing easy or doing complex tasks
When I started learning my university I had extremely strict teacher. He had banished out of university many students (1/3 of my academic group in 2 years); receiving high rates was incredibly hard as well. This challenge forced everyone to intensive learning. Never in my life I had that painful learning. With other guys we spent nights and days on learning, we slept about 4-6 hours for couple of weeks before exams. (I guess there are people reading blog that have finished my university as well: I’m talking Fedyk). If software developers would sharpen their skills and other engineers would work in their field that intensive, we would have artificial intelligence already up and running on the streets :).
So if you feel that you are currently in lucky situation, because you do not have lot of work and you can work relaxed, something is wrong with your attitude to work and your busyness. If indeed that is the case, use that time for your personal development for career and etc. But first please check why you do not have that much work, maybe you are lazy ass.
I also see this to be the way to teach new junior developers. I guess it is great to give them challenging work. It is not always easy to find such work, but that is the greatest you can do for them. In recent time I’ve got new apprentice, if you will. I see it would be hard for him to fit our team and start working effectively in manner of one month term. I have to try different approaches to quickly coach him – kinda throwing him out of comfort zone and then managing stress as one book recommended.
November 1, 2010 DDD, Opinion, PublicTalks, Success No comments
I had chance to speak at yet another Lviv .NET UG meeting. This time I spoke about Domain-Driven Design. It looks like people got interested in this topic.
You can read my feedback post about this event at Lviv .NET UG site by the link “Зустріч #7. Враження, враження, враження…” (it is in Ukrainian).
I will write almost the same here and add some own opinions, so it would be interested not only for those who doesn’t know Ukrainian, but for those who would like to hear my personal opinions.
How it was
It was really great that we’ve got more than 80 people registered for this event. And if company where we hosted this event would provide us with bigger meeting room, we would probably have over 50 near 60 people attending. So as you understand because there was lack of physical room some people just turned around and went home. Crap! I would love to have them all listening to me.
Getting Scrum
Event has two speakers, me and Igor Racyborynsky. Ihor talked about “Getting Scrum”. We all played scrum and formed following product backlog:
It was really interesting, at least not as usual presentation. But he has not covered all about the scrum and at least key concepts. Although it went extremely good.
Domain-Driven Design
I talked about Domain-Driven Design for the 5th time. Yeah! I even don’t need any time to get prepared.
It was late in the evening, so many people got tired, especially me talking over 1 hour bombarding with new and new terms and mentioning lot of information about known concepts and patterns.
This time I’ve got many different cool presents:
Do you know what I like about delivering presentation to huge audience? – I always get couple of people that are excited about my speech and interested in my. They then come and talk with me as I’m an expert. I feet bit scary and nervous to show that I’m not that cool :)
Beer
As usual we have small beer party in the end. This time it probably wasn’t that small. You decide:
Speaking at JUG about DDD
Today I was invited to Java User Group meeting to talk about DDD again. Thank you guys.
October 17, 2010 Career, Opinion, Success No comments
Job and happiness
Cheese
Money table
You can put as Deposit | MDeposit (e.g. 10000) | -be honest | |
You need per day | PerDay (e.g. 100) | PerMonth=PerDay*30 | -calculated |
Per day to be happy | PerDayHappy (e.g. 500) | PayMonthHappy=PerDayHappy*30 | -up to you |
Ave. bank interest | InterestRate (e.g. 0.12) | MInterest=YouHave*InterestRate/12 | -depends on banks |
You are safe: | YouAreSafe=PerMonth*6 | YouHave > YouAreSafe ? (“you are more or less in good situation”) : (“Hey man, do you think about the future?”) | -if you do not have enough to live half a year, something is definitely bad with your budget |
You can live without need to work | YouHaveEnough=PerMonth*12/InterestRate | YouHave > YouHaveEnough ? (“you can stop working without impact on your life”) : (“it is too hard to reach this since needs often increase ”) | months you have to wait to reach this goal:(YouHaveEnough-YouHave)/(MDeposit+MInterest) |
You are free, or even rich | YouHappy=PerMonthHappy*12/InterestRate | YouHave > YouHappy ? (“hey! you are rich”):(“almost none reach this, since they start spending too much when they have enough”) | months you have to wait to reach this goal: (YouHappy-YouHave)/(MDeposit+MInterest) |
What do I recommend to help you find out if some job is for you?
Job of my dream
Questions:
Also I was looking for some other good lists of questions. One is more general and other is awesome list of questions from stackoverflow.
Awesome questions list from stackoverflow
Here below in dark-blue is complete list of questions composed by Rob Wells on stackoverflow. This is copy-paste (!). All rights are reserved for stackoverflow and I do not pretend to be author of any part of it. Please follow this link to see original question.
Questions for development:
Questions about estimating:
Questions regarding the team:
Questions regarding personnel type policies:
Questions about management:
For the manager:
Then I ask them to answer the same kinds of questions for the company as a whole, explaining that I consider there’s such a thing as a company “personality” that usually emanates from the top. I ask how that has changed over the years (if they’ve been there very long).
Further questions on management:
Questions on the work environment:
Miscellaneous questions:
Hope you liked this blog post. Looking forward to hear from you guys!
September 26, 2010 C#, Design Patterns, Java, Opinion, Personal, Success 12 comments
Yeah, title sounds not logically, but you will understand in a few why it is still relevant to this blog post.
It was and it is a good idea to…
In one of my blog posts I’ve decided to have all of the GoF Design Patterns written with Java. And idea itself is very good. Having all of the design patterns written by your own with you own examples gives you understanding of the DP that you cannot gain anywhere else plus to that if you have industrial experience of using all of them you can start think that you are guru of DP.
Process of writing my post on one of the Design Patterns looks like this: I read chapter of the GoF book on the particular DP, then I think up my own example if I do not have it already in my mind and after I’m done with some preliminary ideas I search over the internet for interesting articles on it and probably rethink some of the aspects of my example. After all of that I proceed to writing blog post and source code with Java.
Conclusion: Awesome and probably one of the best ways of learning DP is to have your own example of using it and industrial experience.
Design Patterns articles
One of the intents of having DP written in Java was to familiarize with that language. But it turns out that I did not learn much from Java (except of few things). Also few months ago I started keeping up Tuesday’s Design Pattern on the Lviv .NET User Group Page. Since it is .NET specific UG, I used to do following: 1) translate and 2) translate. In first place it is translation from English to Ukrainian and in second from Java to C#. When with item number one I have to apply some logic and rephrasing I cannot say the same about second item. I just copy code-paste code into Visual Studio and change few keywords. So what do I learn regarding of Java in this case?
I will continue learning Java, but I have to consider better way of doing it. I will also continue writing about Design Patterns, but with examples in C#.
Conclusion: Learning another programming language (Java) is really great idea, but be sure that you choose right approach of doing this.
First free e-book
On the road to Lviv I got perfect idea to start my first book. Of course this cannot be comprehensive stunning author’s book, but I have to start with something. In other words some probing book and this could be this “try it” case. I’m almost sure that there are no books about GoF Design Patterns in Ukrainian. (I suppose that there are in Russian, which can be easily understandable for most Ukrainians…)
How this book will be different?
Why do I need it?
I understand that this book might not be popular at all. But I have to start with something and plus to this it will help me familiarize with the whole process and build my confidence for future.
Also if you have some doubts about my idea I have a question for you: “Have you ever dreamt about your own book? If yes, do you have at least small book written?”
Conclusion: Never be skeptic about starting your first book. It might be a huge step to your success as anything else you are hesitating about but still dreaming about it!