Podcast with a sofware engineer working in Munich

I recently did a podcast (in Turkish) with my cousin who works as the software engineering department head of a company in Munich. In it, we also answered the following questions which were previously asked by my mentee, Nansy:

Question: Did he have to learn on his own or was his university knowledge sufficient?
Answer: You have to learn on your own too.

Question: How important is GPA really?
Answer: Not much if you don't plan to do graduate studies. If your GPA is not great, you have to be able to give reasons for it. Good reasons: Worked on my projects/hobbies, worked part time, traveled around the world. Bad reasons: Watched movies, played games.

Question: How can someone decide which area/language/framework to learn and focus on when there are so many?
Answer: Picking an industry/sector will narrow down the selection. Make sure that your computer engineering fundamentals like algorithms and data structures are sound.

Summer project ideas

Software project ideas for summer 2022:

1. Web Application:

1.1. [PHP] Create a WordPress plugin to rent expensive dresses. It should have a calendar for rent start-end dates. Payment should use iyzico sandbox. It should support vendor/product review.

1.2. Create a multi-vendor Shopify app, similar to and better than Multi Vendor Marketplace. Look at its negative reviews for inspiration, e.g. "looks very trashy and confusing", "error-free bulk data upload"

1.3. Leetcode clone for embedded software development: Exercises and unit tests, board simulators (timer, interrupt, peripheral sim (RAM, SSD, NIC) for driver writing exercises). Vision: Become the TopTal of embedded software development.

1.4. Clone Twitter (simplified LeetCode problem)

1.5. Build a Google Docs clone.

1.6. Build a Codility clone. Step 1: Online code compiler

1.7. Write a Chrome extension to create gif

2. Mobile app: 

2.1. Develop an Android application that gets video from a PC using the mobile hotspot on the phone:

2.2. Payment sharing/bill splitting between a group of friends

3. Automotive:

2.1. Write a simple 2D self driving car demo.

2.2. Collect acceleration data from an RC car, send it to the cloud, on the cloud backend identify road quality from acceleration data and show it on a web page.

2.3. Make openpilot work on CARLA.

4. Website development: Find an existing website that has performance issues, do performance profiling and write a faster  version of it.

5. Finance, cryptocurrency, cybersecurity: 

5.1. Write a Lightning Network clone

5.2. Develop an air gapped Bitcoin wallet.

5.3. Write a uTorrent clone (peer to peer distributed file sharing)

6. Gaming: 

6.1 Write a game that involves puzzle piece placement and path finding and runs in the browser.

6.2. Write a peer-to-peer real time multiplayer game that uses the lockstep protocol (see consensus).

6.3 Clone Just Dance Now. Convert it to use webcam to detect and rate your movement accuracy.

7. Music: Write an app that normalizes sound levels of tracks in a playlist so that the user does not have to fiddle with the volume setting.

8. Aerospace: 

8.1. Write a web app that lets the user change kinematic parameters of a simple aircraft and observe the effects on a 2D trajectory.

8.2. Write a web app that does a simplified 2D version of the moon landing, including orbital calculations.

9. Miscellaneous:

9.1. Improve GeoTools: 

• Create a fork and push your updates to this fork.
• Draw a polygon (e.g. hexagon) on map. Zoom - unzoom with mouse wheel. Drawing should be updated while zooming, it should not wait until mouse wheel stops.
• Pan with the right mouse click and drag. Drawing should be updated while panning, it should not wait until mouse button is released.
• Show country borders.
• On startup, map should center on Turkey and Turkey borders should fill the view.
• Document your progress/challenges, preferably create a public blog and write a developer diary there.

To generate more software project ideas, you can use chatGPT, ProductHunt and KickStarter

Finding a job

Finding a job can be divided into two stages:

• Stage 1, getting an interview:
• Past experience and your contributions
• Full time work
• Part time work
• Internships
• Side projects, Hackathons
• Education
• Tailoring resume/CV for the job you plan to apply
• Polishing LinkedIn profile, getting badges, contacting recruiters
• Preparing for and passing online assessment tests
• Stage 2, passing the interview:
• Preparing for coding questions
• Preparing for behavioral questions
• How do you resolve conflict with your superior / team mate?
• What do you do when it becomes clear that a deadline cannot be met?

Algorithms that you should know by heart

Algorithms that you should know by heart and be able to code without using the internet:

• Binary search
• Bubble sort
• Breadth/Depth first search a tree
• Printing permutations of a string

Programming job opportunities by country

In my last blog post, I showed programming jobs by city, using LinkedIn. This got me thinking about job opportunities by country, normalized by population. Here is a sample for Python jobs:

We see that per capita, there are 124 times more Python jobs in the USA than in Egypt. Netherlands is close to the USA. Comparing Germany and Turkey, Germany has 79 / 3 = 26 times more jobs. These figures provide a rough estimation of opportunity differences in the tech industry. And since talent needs opportunity to flourish, it correlates with the direction and speed of brain drain (human capital flight).

Programming language selection

When selecting a programming language to specialize in, it makes sense to check industry demand. I used LinkedIn's job search and got the following job post numbers:

	Python	Java	JavaScript	C++	C#
Ankara	1296	1375	1340	1197	370
İstanbul	2810	2916	2787	2459	870
Berlin	19280	19105	18043	15727	5871
Munich	18710	18658	17389	15264	4947
Amsterdam	8731	8965	8164	7505	2897
Paris	12039	12672	12344	9969	4825

As you can see, the first four (Python, Java, JavaScript and C++) are close to each other and C# is a distant fifth.

Summer time

Doing extra-curricular projects will be a differentiating factor throughout your professional career because it will demonstrate your interest in the field, desire to learn and motivation. These are highly sought after qualities which separate the top engineers from the average. Below is a question from an online application which shows the importance of having a mobile and a web app project:

Summer is a good time to go the extra mile because there is no exam pressure. Of course there are internships to do, fun places to go, books to read and re-charging for the up coming semester.

If you think you can spare some time during the summer, I can help you with the following in a low-pressure setting:

• Coding projects to enrich your GitHub portfolio
• Ideas
• Bug tracking web app
• Machine Learning: 
• Simple 2D self driving car
• Identify persons in a video using previously saved face image data
• Self driving: Run openpilot on CARLA
• Cryptocurrency: Simple blockchain app
• Simple PageRank app
• 2D web game with pathfinding
• Internet of things: Send sensor data to web server and display data in browser.
• Design guidance
• Management (sprint planning with Trello)
• Implementation (code review, debugging)
• Documentation
• Testing
• Meetings
• Tech discussions, e.g. self driving cars, cryptocurrency, internet of things, games, medicine/bioinformatics. Sectors: Automotive, aerospace, medicine, bioinformatics, games, finance (incl. crypto), cyber security etc.
• Team building: You are not just my mentees but potential founders / colleagues for me and for each other. Think of all these activities as parts of an extended interview.
• Start-up idea brainstorming.

If your summer is not 100% occupied and you want to stand out, send me a message so that we can make plans.