A couple of days ago, John Cook and Aycan Gulez tweeted an article called "How to recognise a good programmer."  I became really focused on item #4: "Hidden experience" in the article.  The author makes the statement "I strongly believe that most good programmers will have a hidden iceberg or two like this that doesn’t appear on their CV or profile. Something they think isn’t really relevant, because it’s not 'proper experience', but which actually represents an awesome accomplishment."

We as programmers and job seekers do a bad job making employers aware of hidden experience.  Even though I was trained as an inorganic chemist, I minored in math, specifically, numerical analysis.  I never mentioned this experience on my resume.  It was so long ago I had forgotten I had minored in math, much less that I remembered any of the numerical techniques.  I was looking at an internal project that was 'stuck' using an Excel spreadsheet, and just happened to recognize the mathematical problem looked a lot like an over determined system.  I was able to apply some already developed (and ancient) code to the problem and obtain a solution in a couple of minutes.  This, I believe, is what the author is referring too when he mentions icebergs of hidden experience.

It might be worth revisiting your hidden experience in your CV or resume.  The experience may be worth more than you think.

I found the following question and answers on stackoverflow.com.  The conversation is about some code I wrote using CoGetObject.  It turns out the problem was between the questioner's ears.

What is the c++ equivalent to GetObject in javascript and vbscript?

It's not often that you get to see someone else defending your code.

I've been experimenting a lot with VMWare lately for a variety of reasons.  One feature I am really intrigued with is "Unity mode".  To give you an idea of this mode, here's a screen shot of VS 2010 beta, seemingly executing on my Windows XP desktop.  Except that it is only an illusion.  Unity mode allows me to display applications executing in a VM directly on my desktop.  In fact, the VS 2010 beta is executing on a Vista VM, but is mapped to parent OS desktop.  Pretty cool...

This is a simple example of the basic code refactoring exercise I am performing with DCDFLIB.  All of these code examples were examined with reflector after compiling to determine a "best path" to follow.

C++ code converted from FORTRAN:

More...

My hosting service is migrating to a new platform, along with some other changes.  I am getting a bit nervous because they started the migration on 1/17/2010 and they seem to still be working with the migration.  I was able to see the new control panel yesterday and I really liked it.  Unfortunately, when I logged in this morning I saw the old platform.  Hopefully, the web site will stay up and running.  Unlike a lot of users, I have no complaints with WebHost4Life.  I've found them to be quite easy to work with.  However, I don't do anything very complicated either.  I just write ASP.Net code.

Updated 1/23/2010: Still no joy.  I seem to be executing on the old server.  I guess I should be happy the code is executing at all.