[syfran]

SixOfEleven, on 1 Sep, 2009 - 06:14 PM, said:

syfran, on 1 Sep, 2009 - 06:36 PM, said:

Those are more ideas for practicing programming correct? I just need something unique to put in a portfolio. I'm fairly sure thats not something someone can really help me with, just wishful thinking.

Any of these programs from the list would be good for a portfolio. You would have to make them full featured professional looking applications and extend them beyond what is given.

- Movie Store
- Airline / Hotel Reservation System
- Bank Account Manager
- Patient / Doctor Scheduler with multiple doctors
- WYSIWG (What you see is what you get) Editor for web pages
- Web Browser with Tabs

I didn't think those projects would be unique about. I guess I should stop assuming

[merlinfire]

syfran, on 1 Sep, 2009 - 06:36 PM, said:

I really don't think it would matter to incredibly much. Both should have similar syntax and similar programming syntax, switching would be just be a matter of relearning the apis and the small syntax differences.

From what I've learned so far with C#, learning the libraries is a huge part of learning the language, maybe the biggest

[syfran]

merlinfire, on 1 Sep, 2009 - 08:12 PM, said:

syfran, on 1 Sep, 2009 - 06:36 PM, said:

I really don't think it would matter to incredibly much. Both should have similar syntax and similar programming syntax, switching would be just be a matter of relearning the apis and the small syntax differences.

From what I've learned so far with C#, learning the libraries is a huge part of learning the language, maybe the biggest

Thats the biggest part if you already know how to program. Knowing how to program is probably the biggest part any programming job. Apis can be quickly googled and there is documentation. It takes a lot more than a couple googles to learn how to effectively program.

[no2pencil]

gabehabe, on 1 Sep, 2009 - 01:17 PM, said:

(For the record, I've been there a year now and I work alongside the senior dev, I'm not really a junior at all any more. Lost the "junior" status after about 4 months)

Wow, has it really been a year? I remember when you were taking trains to your interviews all the time. You were sweating bullets!

[gabehabe]

syfran, on 1 Sep, 2009 - 06:37 PM, said:

gabehabe, how hard was it to get the job and how much of a portfolio did you have at the time?

I had two projects, a clipboard recorder(C++/wxWidgets) and a snippet manager.(C#.NET)

Neither were very good, but they showed I had potential. Together, they'd had about 1,500 downloads by the time I got my job, so it showed I was capable of producing a usable product.

I also had a hell of a lot of tutorials and snippets here at DIC to show them, which they read through in the second interview.

More than anything, to get your foot in the door, you need to show a lot of dedication to what you want to do.

@no2 yeah, almost a year, I started last November.


edit,
If you really can't think of any software ideas, find an open source project to contribute to, or even find some software you like & use regularly and create a plugin for it.

This post has been edited by gabehabe: 02 September 2009 - 12:43 AM

[SixOfEleven]

syfran, on 1 Sep, 2009 - 10:17 PM, said:

merlinfire, on 1 Sep, 2009 - 08:12 PM, said:

From what I've learned so far with C#, learning the libraries is a huge part of learning the language, maybe the biggest

Thats the biggest part if you already know how to program. Knowing how to program is probably the biggest part any programming job. Apis can be quickly googled and there is documentation. It takes a lot more than a couple googles to learn how to effectively program.

I have found that if you have learned how to program in one language learning the basic syntax of another is usually not all that hard, at least as far as procedural and object-oriented languages are concerned. Once you know how a loop works in one language it is usually pretty much the same in another, just a difference of syntax.

So I would say that learning the libraries is the hard part of learning any language. For example, the biggest difference between C# and Java is their libraries and how to use them. The code is pretty similar.