One of my favourite drinking topics with fellow geeks right now is a software bucket list. What are the things that you would love to write before the end of your career. No limits. Write a list and compare with others. This makes a great interview question too. Forget ‘learning android’ or JavaScript. What are the actual types of application that you would love to write? These are not hobby project but things that someone will actually use.
It could be to write a robotics application, a simulation application. Implement the cutting stock algorithm – whatever floats your boat.
If a potential hire can’t give me 5 things on their bucket list, then I am struggling to see their passion for software. I have changed my list over and over. Sometimes hearing someone else’s cool idea means I add it to my list, and sometimes I will remember an old item that makes it back to the list.
What’s on my list? Well that will cost you a beer. I will say that I have knocked 3 off out of my 10 and I am always trying…
So what’s on your software bucket list?
I’ve got a bunch of startup ideas that I consider ‘cool’, that I would want to do, but I haven’t found the way yet to act upon them, so I’m not sure if I should spill the guts on those, but I will tell you this:
I think the world of computing is changing, and part of the change is very visible (i.e. downturn of PCs, upswing of mobile devices) and some of that is invisible (Cloud, Big Data, …). One thing that I think is overlooked is how in today’s computing, with our cheap RAM and 64-bit address space, how many business problems actually just fit in memory and that in most cases we shouldn’t be bothered with an RDBMS until there’s a real need from a different perspective. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on System Prevalence lately and how it can fit in the CQRS style and I think that’s what I would like to spend more time on, and do something totally mindblowing performance wise. It’s probably not a good fit for most projects (but there is no such thing as a silver bullet anyways) but I think that’s a field that’s only begun to be understood.
I think most people are trying to figure out things from a polyglot and horizontal scalability perspective. So I’m trying to find ways to port job engines that will make use of many core/processors on arm devices.
my boat is currently floating on the idea of implementing distributed R-Tree for spatial search and implementation of other spatial functions in a distributed environment which can scale for large datasets. Think something like storing data in a cassandra like environment and using a spatial quadtree /r-ree index rather than the normal B-Tree/triads based search…