George Toderici, one signature away from graduation, is going to be a senior software engineer in Google. We worked closely together this whole semester and he taught, helped and also pwnd me a lot. Meanwhile I found quite interesting his (weird) sense of humor and sarcasm from time to time.
To be honest I have never learned coding systematically. Prior to becoming the instructional assistant for an introductory C++ class, my C++ skills were mostly self-taught and thus rudimentary. For instance, I didn’t know how header files and pointers work. Surprisingly I managed to survive from such experience of having to know the course materials before the students had corresponding classes.
GT, on the other hand, began to program in his early childhood. By fourth grade, he was already programming in C. There is a huge gap here. I am admitting this and trying my best to be as good as him in some aspects, maybe some years later when I will be graduating.
Last week I was trying to modify the acquisition program I rewrote in C++ from his C# version. Inevitably I ran into problems and asked him for help. Having observed my code for a few times, he compared my code to a big ball of mud and suggested a rewrite (not even refactor) after the data acquisition event. Although I am still not sure if he is a truly organized programmer or a great code hacker, of all those inappropriate programming practices that he pointed out I find the lack of error checking most critical.
He later asked me to take a look at a guide he wrote some time ago aiming to help people produce code that their colleague will appreciate. Apparently he was so pissed off that this 21-slide presentation contains nothing but irony after I extracted its kernel ideas, which are the following:
- Write code in English
- Do not handle file I/O’s with absolute (hard coded) paths
- Always perform error checking with informative messages
- Use STL
- Do not use MFC (because there are simpler alternatives)
All right, I think I should just pick up this irony and say, “See? How good I am at summarizing stuff!”
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