CompSci Grad Not your typical graduate

Just for kicks I decided I wanted to update my resume.. I thought it would be a bit nostalgic to go through my work history and reminisce on my previous work experience. What I enjoyed, what I hated.. where i would be if i stayed at a certain company, etc.. I began to realize how truly import work experience is on a resume, in comparison to education or strategically placed keywords.

In the past 15 months at the company I'm at, I learned a lot about the business of software development.. software development as a discipline.. know what I mean? I noticed that small things that I didn't have at other companies go a long way with what I have at this company.. For example, some places I worked at that didn't have a version control system in place added a lot of frustration to the development process that could have been solved if just 1 person put there foot down and said "we're learning SVN!"

Wow! It's been almost a year since my last blog post.. As many of you can probably suspect, I've been very busy developing for iPhone, Android and the web. I've been working for the same company for approximately 15 months now, and it's been a very wild ride.

About a year of iPhone development, the one thing I took away from it was that i was tricked into applying design patterns that I didn't even know existed. I started reading the Cocoa Design Patterns book and was shocked that all the stuff I was doing actually had a comp sci name! I guess that's a benefit of the Cocoa framework; it forces whoever is developing for it to be a good developer. It still surprises me that there are so many poorly written apps out there in the app store. Time to market should probably shoulder most of the blame. Developers think they can throw any piece of crap up there and make a ton of money. Well, good on them for trying, I guess.

I know it's been some time since I've made a blog post, but you have to understand, I've been REALLY busy with this iPhone stuff. Plus I moved to the 'big city' (Downtown Toronto).

I've been learning a lot at the new job. I've done a lot of different kinds of iPhone apps, and there has been a significant amount of API building (on my part) due to my web experience. That's kind of fun and interesting. Though, I was hoping to learn more about different types of mobile development.

That is one thing I've learned about mobile development. There is a bit of a longer turn around from feature request to feature build to feature test to feature delivery. Then once the feature is delivered, the client will no doubt have small issues with the way it turns out, so you need to repeat the process all over again. With web work, it's rather instant. Client asks for something, you can probably code it on the spot, and then the client can see it right away on the staging server.

I haven't made a blog post in 2 weeks for a pretty good reason. I was lucky enough to land an iPhone development job with a mobile dev start up. So I've been busy working on getting up to speed with how the company works, and getting to know my way around the iPhone platform. And if there is one thing I've learned in the last 2 weeks, it's that my 500 page iPhone dev book can not cover everything you can learn from hands on experience and a ton of googling.

So here's how the job capture went down. On a Wednesday night, I was on craigslist looking for iPhone dev jobs using my link that I posted in my last blog post. I would once in a while hit refresh to see if anyone posted a job. So about at 10pm, I saw a job post that seemed to have been ripped right from my mind. They talked about looking for intermediate developers who don't have too much mobile dev experience, and have a passion to learn from developers with 5-10 years of mobile dev experience. I couldn't believe it. It was as if someone was watching my life, and posted a job post directed towards me, and it was some elaborate hoax.