[Dogstopper]

Get to know you Java Forum Leaders! Forum leaders are well, leaders of their respective forums and are passionate about that particular technology. Read more about who we are and what we do here:
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Stephen Schwahn - Dogstopper

I'm currently 16 and a Junior preparing for college. I have been programming for about four years now and originally started by programming the Lego NXT for Lego Robotics in 7th grade. Then I became interested in doing more and started learning C++. However, once I found Java, I liked it at once. I still use C++ for some things like game programming, but my love is Java.

I am a full time student and that takes up most of my time, but when I'm not doing school, I'm programming, helping on DIC, or sleeping. Occasionally, I like watching TV, but you will typically find me programming in some form.

I also do some freelancing doing website construction, but I hope that I will be able to do Java freelancing some day as well.

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Martyr2

Hello everyone, I go by the name of Martyr2 and I am American even though I live in Vancouver Canada. I have been programming for over 13 years and have worked as a programmer in many industries. Some of my experience includes appliance retail software, the travel industry where I was responsible for over 170+ websites world-wide and just recently transferred over to a hot tech company doing communication software. I consider this job a bit of a "think tank" because of the free reign I am given to explore programming concepts. The last few years I have focused on system/algorithm design, best practices and general programming theory.

Over the last 3.5 years I have helped thousands of people with hundreds of them being in Java alone. I like providing working examples and giving thoughtful explanations of "why" we should do something rather than just "Because it works". I also like to spread out the answers across multiple forums here at DIC. Since I have broadened my programming language horizons I am often asked to create solutions that merge multiple technologies and create mashups.

I am constantly reading programming books everywhere I go so I am a bit of a bookworm. This often means that I can review a lot of books and provide assistance on picking great books to learn from. It also means there is little I haven't seen in the way of programming... good and bad. I hope to extend this knowledge to save you time and get you simple to understand solutions to big problems.

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jumptrooper - David Hubbell

I'm 27 years old and program for a small company in Auburn, CA. We provide software for County and local government, mainly dealing with the processing, archival and retrieval of official documents (deeds, transfers, marriage licenses, birth certificates, etc.).

I became interested in computers when I was about 7 or 8 when my dad brought home an IBM clone PC. The screen only displayed in black and shades of yellow and the thing only had about 600K of RAM but it had Tetris!

In middle school I started messing around with BASIC. I'd check out books from the library and diligently copy the examples line by line in hopes of seeing an ASCII comet flash across the screen for half a second. That was alright...but it was a lot of work for something below even the standards of an NES console. But I was hooked.

In high school, I took electronics my freshman year, intro to programming my sophomore year, and AP CS my junior year. They were challenging, but I really enjoyed them. But best of all, I got my own computer! It was an Inteva with a 700Mhz Pentium 2 and Windows 98! Oh yeah! What could be better!? No more yellow Tetris blocks for me - I could play Command and Conquer: Red Alert and later Half-Life!

Then... I fell off the wagon...

I went to Westmont College, in Santa Barbara, and my first year there I spent more time with my girlfriend than studying and my grades went down. I concluded I sucked at programming and ended up changing majors. I finished with a BA in Psychology, almost a BA in Religious Studies, and a minor in CS. I went on to get half way through a masters program in Marriage and Family Counseling when I realized the most of the people in the program were idiots, along with the professors (my undergrad psych professors were way better!) and that there was no happy future in counseling. By that point I had been working in the mental health field for several years and, let me tell you, it sucks and you get paid nothing. I decided that I needed to get back to my true love of programming so I took some classes at city college, got my AS in three semesters and found the job I'm presently working at. I couldn't be happier now!

Currently, I'm programming in Java, CQCS, and Perl.

Personally:
I'm married to a wonderful woman I met after I graduated from college. I was born in the country of Niger, which is next to Nigeria and touches the Southwest end of the Sahara. I enjoy swimming, snowboarding, reading, playing Starcraft, RC airplanes, photography, guitar, and lots of other stuff. I'm super excited that I'm going to become a Dad around July 9th of next year (2011)! I help teach 1st grade Sunday school at my church. My favorite show is BBC's Top Gear.

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Nir Tsruya japanir

Hey all, My name is Nir Tsruya, I am 24 years old, and currently I am a second year CS student.
I wrote my first lines of code as HTML scripts when I was 14, and have been coding ever since. I coded in Assembler, C\C++ and VB6 as part of my studies, and job, but never had a chance to even glance at Java. Until 2 years ago, when I was with my girlfriend in a book store to buy a present for my sister, I suddenly said to her, "It is about time I learn a new programming languahe". I randomly picked a book, and of course it was a Java book. I felt in love with the language at once.

Being a CS Student is not easy... It is not all about coding, but also lots of Theory, Math and Computer architecture. And if that is not enough, I also work as a PHP developer.
I spend most of my free time with my girlfriend (we watch House together, wer'e totally addicted), friends, playing my guitar (I have an old Cort guitar I got from my parents) and of course, CODING!

cfoley

I'm 28 and doing a PhD in bioinformatics. These days I mostly use Java but programming has been my hobby since I was 9 and I've used a few different languages over the years. I started with BASIC on a 48K spectrum (The one with the rubber keys!) and got very good at all the things that are now considered bad programming style.

When I'm not coding I'm practising martial arts or riding my motorbike, and would recommend both to anyone looking to improve their programming skills.

[IamTw_]

Dogstopper, on 04 December 2010 - 09:31 AM, said:

That is why I am still really oriented to performance issues. I am allergic to

ArrayList al = new ArrayList();
for(int i = 0; i < al.size(); ++i)

when it should be

int len = al.size();
for(int i = 0; i < len; ++i)

Why is it so?

[Dogstopper]

The latter is more memory-efficient potentially (becasue you don't call size() repeatedly).

[pbl]

Dogstopper, on 27 February 2011 - 10:10 PM, said:

However, the compiler did that automatically. Thus, my statement likely is no longer true.

What ???
Sorry Dogstopper not true. Put a break point in the second statement of size() and you will see it will be called each time.

The compiler does not have a slightest clue to know that size() may not change. And actually it can be changed by another thread.

How often did I code

while(vector.getSize() == 0) {
   try {
     Thread.sleep(
   }
   catch(
}
Object o - vector.get(0);
....

This post has been edited by pbl: 27 February 2011 - 08:20 PM

[Dogstopper]

Oops. Sorry pbl, I used an array...not an ArrayList. I fixed my post.

[v0rtex]

Hey! Great job so far, I really enjoy the speed with which Java Threads are answered

[nick2price]

So when the aliens finally visit us, and request to be taken to my leader, I know who to take them too!! Enjoy the probing!!! Great job guys, keep up the good work. Without being bias, you guys make the java forum the best forum across Dreamincode!