** UnhandledExceptionEventHandler :: OFFICIAL LC / CHATTER THREAD **

[sylar]

i'd rather eat granola and work with Hadoop, than foie gras and Cosmos. what a cluster****.

[MikeyObviously]

I've had a hard time explaining some resume gaps recently. I'm currently unemployed, my last job was as a web communications analyst for nearly four years. Before that however...I was a pro poker player (gasp!) and a college dropout.

I've been skirting the issue, trying my best to close the gaps on the resume with projects I've worked on (even though it wasn't how I made my living).

Have any of you been truthful about your poker past in the world of tech job searches? Should I just come out and say it?

[Neil S]

Originally Posted by MikeyObviously

I've had a hard time explaining some resume gaps recently. I'm currently unemployed, my last job was as a web communications analyst for nearly four years. Before that however...I was a pro poker player (gasp!) and a college dropout.

I've been skirting the issue, trying my best to close the gaps on the resume with projects I've worked on (even though it wasn't how I made my living).

Have any of you been truthful about your poker past in the world of tech job searches? Should I just come out and say it?

You did no consulting at all during that span?

[clowntable]

Originally Posted by MikeyObviously

I've had a hard time explaining some resume gaps recently. I'm currently unemployed, my last job was as a web communications analyst for nearly four years. Before that however...I was a pro poker player (gasp!) and a college dropout.

I've been skirting the issue, trying my best to close the gaps on the resume with projects I've worked on (even though it wasn't how I made my living).

Have any of you been truthful about your poker past in the world of tech job searches? Should I just come out and say it?

I have poker pro in my resume for the time where that way my main source of income. My assumption is a simple one, if people don't see how that could actually be an interesting skillset or at least try to understand it it's a workplace I don't want to be stuck at anyways. So it's actually a pretty good filter (if you feel you can pick and choose your employer and are not in "need work" mode).

Despite what the poker coaching industry and so forth want to tell you making a living from poker is pretty hard. You need a very solid mindset and understanding of variance vs your skill degrading. You need to be self motivated and constantly learn and improve. You need to understand how the long run works. You need an excellent analytical mindset.
All that is valuable.

[greg nice]

man i just spend TWO DAYS trying to get a demo php app for a web api working. fv<kin thing was full of bugs, php syntax errors, etc. jesus christ.

• inconsistent variable names $productID and $product_id
• incorrectly using variable syntax when hes defined var as a constant instead
• bad links across the project <a href="/billing.php"> seriously "/"
• 'undefined constant' errors cause the guy didn't quote his strings

its like the guy just posted the project on github without ever testing whether it worked or even paying any attention to php error messages

at least now i'll learn how to use github and fork a project. these bastards should be paying me

[RiverFenix]

I'm looking for some ideas on the best way(s) to proceed with a website. I have a lot of data organized in excel files that I want to extract and display. What I'm looking for, I assume, is getting into database management.

Primarily I am looking to recreate the tables from excel to be displayed in a similar fashion. How do I take the cell information and transpose it to the site? This involves (again assuming here) converting the excel to some format (would love to avoid manual data entry) that some language/script will then turn into tables. Is there a way I can just convert to csv, upload, then get output? I can do the css/html for the output, my issue is I don't know the best way to get that output. In terms of size it is ~10 sheets, none being uniform, with anywhere from 20-500 cells of data per sheet.

I realize what I'm asking is very general but I have no experience in this area so I don't know what I should be learning. Any help is appreciated.

[splashpot]

Do you need your website to stay in sync with any changes that happen in the spreadsheet? Is the data going to change at all?

[There Is A Light]

Anyone of you hired programmers have any thoughts on QA's? I might be getting a job as a QA for a software company which makes roster programmes. The office employs about 5 QA's and around 10 programmers. I am not very technical at all and know nothing about programming. Is this normally the case with QA's who you have dealt with or will I struggle to interact problems effectively with the programming team with no IT background?

(I think I worded this post awfully, sorry I'm very tired.)

[kerowo]

QA is more about being methodical and thorough than necessarily being able to read the code. It'd be good to pick up the architecture so you know where what you are seeing on the application is coming from, but I'd rather have someone who can narrow down the cause of a bug and document it than a wannabe dev.

[RiverFenix]

Originally Posted by splashpot

Do you need your website to stay in sync with any changes that happen in the spreadsheet? Is the data going to change at all?

Yes, but that isn't a major concern at the moment. Eventually I would like it to be so that all I have to do is update the ss, upload/convert it on backend, it gets updated front end.

[There Is A Light]

Originally Posted by kerowo

QA is more about being methodical and thorough than necessarily being able to read the code. It'd be good to pick up the architecture so you know where what you are seeing on the application is coming from, but I'd rather have someone who can narrow down the cause of a bug and document it than a wannabe dev.

Thanks, very nervous I'm gonna be completely out of my depth. This opportunity has only come about via a combination of slight nepotism and a manager who seems a bit mentally ill and took a massive liking to me for no reason. I'm trying to furiously teach myself basic computer shiz before my training starts (if my training starts, not a done deal yet I should say).

[kerowo]

When in doubt buy the devs Whiskey.

[splashpot]

Originally Posted by RiverFenix

Yes, but that isn't a major concern at the moment. Eventually I would like it to be so that all I have to do is update the ss, upload/convert it on backend, it gets updated front end.

I think it depends on how much control and customization you want. If you want your data in a database and control over everything, you could write a dynamic web app using a language of your choice (PHP, Python, Ruby, etc) and have a db handling the data. Then you could write a script that would upload a csv file to your db.

If you want something much easier, Wordpress apparently has a csv importer plugin. I have not used it though.

[clowntable]

The office employs about 5 QA's and around 10 programmers.

Sounds like a bad place to work at lol

Yes, but that isn't a major concern at the moment. Eventually I would like it to be so that all I have to do is update the ss, upload/convert it on backend, it gets updated front end.

oood.py or something similar might be interesting for you, would require converting excel to open office calc but that's easy. Actually iirc oood can handle the conversion.

[daveT]

Originally Posted by greg nice

man i just spend TWO DAYS trying to get a demo php app for a web api working. fv<kin thing was full of bugs, php syntax errors, etc. jesus christ.

• inconsistent variable names $productID and $product_id
• incorrectly using variable syntax when hes defined var as a constant instead
• bad links across the project <a href="/billing.php"> seriously "/"
• 'undefined constant' errors cause the guy didn't quote his strings

its like the guy just posted the project on github without ever testing whether it worked or even paying any attention to php error messages

at least now i'll learn how to use github and fork a project. these bastards should be paying me

If you are ever feeling down about it, just watch this and replace "Sony" with "Open Source Project:"
NSFW

... and fill in the rest of the blanks yourself.

I've found myself in a quandary: I'm stuck, yet I am afraid to search "Where do I put my POM in Maven."

And then I figured I may not need Maven at all...