Rob Farley : academia

4 questions to evaluate people's passion

Rob Farley — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 03:32:00 GMT

I'm going to find this topic very interesting when I'm training people more and more. Kathy Sierra gives us four questions to judge someone's passion for their work:

When was the last time you read a trade/professional journal or book related to your work? (can substitute "attended an industry conference or took a course")
Name at least two of the key people in your field.
If you had to, would you spend your own money to buy tools or other materials that would improve the quality of your work?
If you did not do this for work, would you still do it (or something related to it) as a hobby?

Some of this comes down to Mitch Denny's concept of a night-programmer, but Kathy has expanded it to cover any field. I guess if I'm asking these questions of people in courses I'm running, then the answer to the first question is "I'm in one", but I think it's very different to if I were to ask the people who attend my user-group.

Some people who attend courses are there because they want to be, but others might just be there because their employer has sent them. User-group attendees are generally taking their own time to be there, which generally makes them more passionate. I hope that even if the attendees of my courses came simply because they were made to, they will catch some passion and leave being able to answer those questions better. Perhaps they'll even do another course soon because they will have caught the bug of Professional Development.

These questions also rank right up there in ways to evaluate whether a potential employee is a good match or not. If you hire someone who is passionate about their work, then you might get challenged as an employer occasionally, but you'll probably also get a better worker, someone who comes to work wanting to do a good job, rather than someone who just sees each day as waiting for the weekend. I'm all for 'working to live rather than living to work', but if you're passionate about your work, then you probably enjoy your work more and probably have a better work ethic to boot.

On learning (Calvin and Hobbes, the ACS and digital natives)

Rob Farley — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 01:52:00 GMT

Digital natives learn differently. How do we take advantage of that? The funny thing is that right away, I've written this from an external perspective, when I'm probably in a mixture of both camps. Feel free to consider me in either camp as you...(read more)

Faster binary converter - where do your solutions come from?

Rob Farley — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 23:53:00 GMT

Mitch Wheat is a great guy. He really is. And he's clearly a mathematician.

I mean, I did a half-major as part of my BSc, doing a handful of 3rd year Pure Maths subjects (which I got HDs in too - I wasn't just sleeping during class), but Mitch... he thinks like a mathematician. You can tell when he comes up with a solution like this for converting numbers to binary. Makes me wonder if this is something he came up with, or something he read in a book. Knowing Mitch, he came up with it himself. I'm in a bit of awe here. I feel like it's the kind of solution that I could've come up with once upon a time, and hopefully could still given the right colleagues and a whiteboard. :)

Let's come back to the 'solution read in a book' thing.

I remember sitting in a user-group meeting in Redmond in March. Itzik was speaking. He was talking about the use of CLR in SQL, and came across the Product aggregate function. There is no product() in T-SQL, and a lot of people have considered that it's a good candidate for CLR, since you can make a user-defined aggregate function this way. Itzik's lines were something like "And I was sure there was a good way of doing this without having to use CLR, so I got reading my maths books." He mentioned some of the names that I have a vague recollection of from my university days (which I have forgotten again so won't write here), and then said that he came across log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b). And of course, almost everyone in the room had light-bulbs appear.

I wasn't so much inspired by the fact that "here's this great way of solving the product question", but rather "here's a way of solving some miscellaneous thing, where the answer comes out of a maths book." And now I've found Mitch providing me with the same hunger to academise (that's not a word, but you know what I mean).

I nearly got into academia. Having done uni, I had offers to do a PhD. But I had a good job offer, and studying didn't seem like it was going to pay the bills. A large part of me would've liked to have done. I remember being a research assistant for Professor John Crossley at Monash, helping to write code (in CAM/L, using a Tcl/Tk interface) to try to convert mathematical proofs into computer programs (the idea being that if you can prove - using really fundamental principles - that for all x, there exists a number y that has particular properties, then that proof should be able to be converted 'automatically' into a program which will find that y). I found that fascinating. I don't know whether the theory ever got really proven, but I found academia really interesting.

And of course, in the 'real' world, the uses of academia are somewhat doubted. It was good to see a locknote session at Tech.Ed (AU) this year about some of the image processing stuff that Microsoft Research Labs are working on. But I'm also really curious to know about algorithms for solving interesting problems.