Yeah BA is way over-priced, but aside from a few of their completely nonsensically simple recipes I've never made anything comparable for $2 - $3 a person. The $5.50 mark sounds about right for me in the midwest and I'm buying pretty good quality ingredients still. I often splurge and go to $8 - $10 a person but that's totally excessive :)
I've cooked and bought groceries in NYC several times and while the prices are definitely competitive with some hunting, the 99c whole chicken I found was total garbage and basically was like water and salt.
My step-dad used to swear he couldn't tell a difference between the $1.99 special chicken and the regular stuff I bought that was $4 - 6.99. To me the $1.99 tastes like eating saline solution (I've had saline injections, it tasted like that to me). Maybe it's just a question of taste.
> I've shown my resume to various people in the field and they said it was fine aside from a few conflicting opinions of moving one thing somewhere else or other minor details.
I learned the hard way that, generally, games reflect poorly in many non-NYC/LA/SEA cities. For some reason I will never understand, people think they're easy or that you're a liar. Get in to some new projects and generalize what you did in to specific tasks that demonstrate competence. E.g. I worked on an "MMO-ish" game with about 500 users a month (30 - 40 concurrent). I ended up making no mention it was a game but rather referred to it as a networking system I built in college :) Once I got in to the room, I would de-emphasize that it was a game and focus on some of the cool stuff I did.
Many years of reviewing and having my resume reviewed by varying people (HR, managers in varying trades, etc) has made me come to the conclusion that unless your resume is "Good", it's bad. Also keep in mind tech people are often the last people to review your resume. You're selling yourself (your product) to HR first and tech people second. You need to find managers and HR folks and have them review your resume. Alternatively, some markets have very good recruiter firms that can help tailor your resume to the local market and attract lots of job options.
What people you've talked to are nicely telling you is that your resume is not good enough to get noticed. Your resume is good enough when you hear "Hey, this is good. In fact, I wish (we're hiring/most were this good/I knew you were looking)!"
It sounds like you already have the right attitude, but you need to stand out. Because you aren't living knee-deep in a big city and no appreciable experience, you're at a huge disadvantage. But all of that can be overcome with a pivot on your part, I think.
I am also often similarly loathe to apply to positions without posted salary ranges. Unfortunately, in my experience, it's often "taboo" to bring up pay early-on in the discussions. But on the flip side, I've found that people who don't like to talk about pay usually don't want to pay much either, so it almost is a self-selection criterion that has worked really well in the past.
But I really like that you approach it this way - practical, sensible, and acknowledges that both parties' time has value.
When I bought my first home my loan (P+I) payment was $1300 per month on average (paid every 2 weeks), which was not only affordable but cheaper than what I was renting at once you accounted for interest deductions! But the taxes were somewhere around $500 a month after the township raised local property tax by the maximum year after year. Due to average daily balance laws and escrow regulations, we often had a substantial amount of money "invested" in to our escrow account.
There was no amount of deductions to make this home an asset. It pushed a good quality home at a great price to something that now remains completely unoccupied.
My situation is 100% atypical - but I more meant to illustrate how big of an impact property taxes can be.
The standard rounding for financial applications is typically Banker's Rounding, which is another way of describing rounding to the nearest even. E.g. 1.5 rounds up to 2 but 6.5 rounds down to 6. Over the long haul, this method of rounding produces the least amount of error. Some regulations and laws, though, specify different rounding techniques or specific phases in a process where rounding must or must not be performed. Especially critical in things like forex and other trading type applications. In addition to what byoung2 mentioned, Canadian law has specific rounding regulations that change based on what payment method is being used, but (as far as I know) don't generally apply to things like interest calculations and stuff like that[1].
ISO 4217 works well for display purposes but doesn't work for all financial applications. Consider, for example, scenarios involving tax or a product billed based on usage. By rounding off at each processing step, the company could be losing substantial amounts of money. The last two companies I've worked have used varying types of mechanisms for tracking fractions of pennies. In some circumstances, it makes sense to store everything as integers with a separate column to represent precision, but I would probably not do this unless you have a specific use. It's a lot of noise and mucks up the source code worse than, say, a BigDecimal or Decimal type. At the current job, we store everything with 6 digits of precision because of the nature of our billing and use Decimal as a reserved type for only money.
To be honest, if you have an accounting department you probably want to involve them in these discussions because rounding decisions can have impact on your financial statements and, potentially, any audits that may occur in the future. I've worked on two financially focused applications so far and I would strongly suggest that you build out a very defined and clear way to manipulate money for rounding purposes. Building out those processes in a standardized and well-defined way makes for easy unit tests and also helps those who come in the future understand the decisions made.
I hate to say this, but a lot of your issues might also be coming from the TFS integration. I know I used to have a bear of a time with random crashes and issues. Since switching to git & resharper I have had a much, much easier time.
With 1 notable exception of 1 huge project.
On large, 40+ project, solutions it seems like Visual Studio just falls on its face. Our new team is redirecting toward microservice approaches in light of some of these frustrations.
Not that your arch should be dictated by your editor, but quality of life is what it is.
> I hate to say this, but a lot of your issues might also be coming from the TFS integration.
I suspect some of the problems are, for sure - our big internal project is a multi-million line app, maybe 70-80 csprojs. VS2013 dealt with it OK, but had its occasional problems (the TFS issues weren't occasional though), VS2015 is much worse in general. It's very unstable.
My open-source project LanguageExt [1] uses git and isn't that large. I still get crashes and lock-ups. It was the first project I migrated to DNX also. It takes an age to build (where the sln/csproj system doesn't), and nails the CPU (99% usage). Something is very wrong, and very unfinished.
I can see where MS is going with this new open-source tools approach, but at the moment the whole thing seems to be a mess, and VS just can't deal with it. The one ray of light is the git integration. That works for the most common scenarios. I only occasionally have to drop back to the cmd line.
It seems like every time there's a new project format the first version is just really awful. I think they really only test it on small almost toy-level projects thoroughly but fully conjecture.
That's a very cool project though - what got you going on that? If I could convince my coworkers to not kill me for doing so, I would try to introduce using that at work :-) I've definitely gotten them on to the immutability by default train of thought tho - a lot of people very happy with that mindset considering how much of work has become parallel processing. It's amazing how much faster you can do things like build invoices of thousands of items when you can process the whole thing in parallel :-D
My pref has always been command line tbh - getting away from TFS was the best thing that ever happened for me.
I'm a CTO of a healthcare software house in London, we've been developing a very large web-app in C# over the past 10 years. Over the years it has evolved as any project does, but I started noticing more and more that OO was really not the right tool for the job of managing large inter-dependant systems (well, the Java/C# brand of OO anyway). The promise of re-use, decoupling, composition, ... all seemed to be lies. On top of that I started to get a sense of the common bugs that were coming through: null-reference errors being by far the biggest. The in-your-face bugs like null-ref errors are relatively easy to spot though, what becomes more problematic over time is shared mutable state logic errors. They can remain buried for some time.
I'd already had an interest in functional programming piqued by LINQ and Erik Meijer's talks on Haskell. I spent some time learning Haskell and F#, and came to the understanding that the stability and reliability of a system could be massively improved if null didn't exist, if objects were immutable by default, and if functions were pure/referentially transparent. Expression oriented programming became my order-of-the-day, but C# kept getting in the way. Unfortunately I couldn't just drop it and move to F# because our code-base is huge and written in C#.
So that's when I started writing csharp-monad [1], it was my first attempt at bringing functional concepts into C#. It had a couple of problems though, and they were:
* The types were classes, and therefore if a function returned Option<T> then it could still be null
* It followed the '.NET BCL way' of having functions like GetValueOrDefault() - again breaking the safety net that an Option type (for example) is supposed to give.
It had benefits though, primarily that I could make composable computations with the various monads (using LINQ). The problem with that approach was that it quickly bumped up against the rest of the BCL. And, in my case, the rest of our multi-million line C# OO app.
So I mothballed that project to an extent. I'd use it now and again where I had control over a process end-to-end. But it got me thinking, that the main issues I had were:
1. Non-expression based C# constructs (if/else, switch, etc.)
2. OO-heavy core types, like List<T>, Dictionary<K,V>, etc.
3. Whenever I brought in 3rd party libraries that 'did functional', they wouldn't work with my Option type in csharp-monad, or any of my functional types - and they never could because there's no baseline for functional (other than LINQ) in C#.
4. The lack of more expressive LINQ grammar makes it less useful and sometimes more cumbersome than Haskell's 'do' notation or F#'s computation expressions.
1-3 cries out for an equivalent of a BCL for functional constructs. I was under no illusion how big a job that would be, but I could see real value in it: a unified set of types for Option, Either, Try as well as collections Lst, Map, etc.
"A functional prelude for C#"
And once I saw that C# 6 allowed 'using static' I saw that as an opportunity to really create a 'functional BCL' that actually looks like a functional language. A chance to take C# in a more Scala-like direction (which if you think about it, is where it's going, it just doesn't have the libraries to support it). So that's when language-ext [2] was born.
Item 4 was more problematic. I couldn't create more LINQ grammar. So I started thinking about it in a different way. Mostly I wanted to create expression oriented code. It was just safer. But with C# OO you always hit that expression boundary. So I thought about how I could control the boundary. Some of that was to build 'matching' constructs into the core types, but that wouldn't deal with all boundary issues. That's where the actor system comes in (LanguageExt.Process [3] ). I'd looked at Akka.net and its very Java-like API horrified me - it looked like C# 1.0. So I took the idea that a LanguageExt Process (an actor) is a fold over a stream. That suddenly created a very powerful idea that I could create packets of pure computation and wrap them with their state, and each message would evolve that state. In one fell swoop it created a better and more controlled OO that can interact with pure functions - and all fully integrated with the functional BCL I'd developed. It also allowed us to start breaking up our monolithic app in a much more controlled way.
So yeah, that's the back story! Sorry if it turned into War & Peace.
Btw, I am in the market for two developers at the moment. So if none of what you just read horrified you, please drop me an email with your CV to plouth AT gmail :)
We use git exclusively as a Windows-based shop and only 1 person uses the git integration with Visual Studio. Everyone else uses different solutions from tortoise to source tree to command line.
I think there's definitely a decent market for this sort of thing - I've had plenty of conversations locally that end with "Wow, I'm so glad to get away from Visual Studio for this"
I don't think [many/most] gamers consider gaming to be "a real addiction" - especially FPS games. I definitely have friends that I don't want to play games, I don't talk to them about games, and when the subject of games comes up I actively try to move it elsewhere because when they gamed that's literally all they did. As someone who enjoys going out, it's so weird to ask someone "Hey, wanna go do XYZ" and have them be like "nah dude, let's just hit up ABC game like usual - I played all weekend to get us set up for tonight".
People don't realize that it's like you wouldn't invite your now-sober alcoholic friend to the bar unless you knew they were absolutely comfortable with it.
I'm glad you got outside of it. Games are awesome and a lot of fun, but there's a lot of other really awesome stuff out there too.
Honestly, I'm not sure. I mean, I play games too - don't get me wrong. I am not sure how much of gaming comes down to being healthy or not and how much is just the culture. The very limited exposure I had to ingress involved a lot of drinking and eating out. It definitely was not even close to neutral calorie wise.
But I didn't get in to Augmented Reality games and it's not my shtick. At the end of the day, I definitely use games as a way to decompress.
For me, personally, when I go out I have a hard time wanting to have anything to do with the computer, be it software dev or games.
I've cooked and bought groceries in NYC several times and while the prices are definitely competitive with some hunting, the 99c whole chicken I found was total garbage and basically was like water and salt.
My step-dad used to swear he couldn't tell a difference between the $1.99 special chicken and the regular stuff I bought that was $4 - 6.99. To me the $1.99 tastes like eating saline solution (I've had saline injections, it tasted like that to me). Maybe it's just a question of taste.