Industry work vs academic research - blogs reading time

June 14, 2016

  Come cross the article about an engineer working for Google, a computer professor made a career change. Have some readings:

1. http://matt-welsh.blogspot.ca/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html

2. http://matt-welsh.blogspot.ca/2010/05/secret-lives-of-professors.html

3. http://matt-welsh.blogspot.ca/2014/01/getting-job-at-google-for-phd-students.html

4. Find a good topic to read:
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.ca/2013/02/grad-students-learn-how-to-give-talk.html

Julia's comment about how to give a talk:

Know your topic very well. I still remember the advice I got many years ago, "Do not waste other people's time - even it is 5 minutes. If you do not understand the topic, then stop talking!", "Reading related articles more than 10 hours, not working on a concrete example, coding/ experiment/ third party, it does not count!"

For example, Julia worked on binary tree least common ancestor more than 10 hours in less than 1 week, she wrote code more than 5 times, two solutions; definitely, she can give a talk over 15 minutes about the algorithm any time without any preparation, present the problem, draw some diagram, write some code, and then go over it, line by line, each variable, each executable path, discuss all kinds of bugs if there is a mistake. She knows 4-5 possible mistakes, because she made one by one, and then, spent more than half hour to fix one by one. It will be a fun talk.

http://juliachencoding.blogspot.ca/2016/04/find-lowest-common-ancestor-of-two.html

5. Code Review
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.ca/2012/02/my-love-affair-with-code-reviews.html

Julia's comment: 
Julia's favorite books: The art of readable code, clean code, and then, C++ code guidelines. 
And also favorite object oriented principles: S.O.L.I.D., good design principle - simple vs difficult.

Choose "Old school" or "new school", prepare a guideline for code review.  To write readable code/ clean code,  practice the code review based on guidelines. 

Also, really work on coding skills, read a lot of code. For example, HackerRank, Two string, hundreds of solutions - compared the difference, find the best one. And be the best one in your coding practice. 

HackerRank: Two string - thinking in JavaScript over 10 ways

http://juliachencoding.blogspot.ca/2016/03/hackerrank-two-string-thinking-in.html

Thinking in C++ over 15 ways
http://juliachencoding.blogspot.ca/2016/03/hackerrank-two-string-thinking-in-c.html

6.
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.ca/2010/06/working-for-google.html

7.
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.ca/2016/06/death-by-peer-review.html

Very good analysis - peer review - anonymous/ ad hoc  vs principled leadership organization

Which is more controllable? Work on controllable things - NO Matter how hard it is, you work hard, you will make it one day.