Tag Archives: Job
How to be a programmer? (and more)
Posted on 09. Jul, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.
So you are one of the the people I refered to in my previous article and you really, really, really want to be a programmer.
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How to be a programmer (Mirror) | |
| I just came across a nice (pretty old) document I found on the internet, which explains all kinds of basics of being a programmer. | ||
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Gamers Manifesto | |
| I found a nice article about gaming too. With some very recognizable irritations in the current generation of games. |
What's wrong with our market?
Posted on 08. Jul, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.
The experiences I have are mainly about the dutch market, but they also might apply to any other market.
We (as I group all Software Engineers together) are currently in a market that might look very good for us. Companies are desperately trying to get Software Engineers (from now on SE) , no matter the price. If you switch jobs now, you can demand almost anything you want. In the Netherlands there is a trend now to even give 2 lease cars with a job, just to get you to work for them. How weird is that? How am I gonna drive 2 cars at the same time??
Of course this sounds very good for us, but this also creates a very unhealthy situation..
Continue ReadingConverting 70.000+ XML Documents
Posted on 02. Jul, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.
At work I have written a XML converter, which should (daily) convert over 70.000 XML documents to a different format. Depending on some attributes set in the XML file, a couple of values of elements should be extracted and inserted in the XML document again (but in a different location).
Please don’t ask me why I need this, but it is a terrible solution for something that would sound so simple.
The only way to solve this problem (which I saw) was opening each individual file, load them in an XmlDocument object and track down the elements and attributes I needed using xPath.
Only halfway the script the memory consumption of the tool goes through the roof (around ~1.4GB), at least on our Windows 2003 server, where the application is running.
When I run that application on my Windows Vista x64 machine, there is no problem at all and the memory consumption is at ~20MB.
I tried finding memory leaks in my application, by using a couple of different profile applications, but they didn’t detect any large memory leaks, that could cause these problems.
What the heck is going on?
*sigh*: somehow the server puts all the 70.000 XML files in 5 files, and that way it creates 5 files of around 800MB. I disabled that script and now the memory consumption on the server is also back to normal.
Continue Reading