I'm at home today, thanks to this awful weather and my body not liking weather changes much. So being at home, I was twitter-surfing and came across the tweets of one of my favorite programming bloggers/authors. In one of his recent tweets, he mentions (in passing) that he has a mentor, which I find quite interesting.

I've been reading up on mentoring a lot lately. Being in a professional organization such as the Association for Computing Machinery, I'm exposed to some interesting benefits, including membership to MentorNet. So after receiving numerous emails on it, I figured I'd check it out. I've spent quite a bit of time reading through the MentorNet site to get a better idea of the way they work.

In many past experiences, I've been shadowed by younger students and younger programmers and techies. I've enjoyed being able to share my experiences and knowledge with them, and I especially enjoyed being able to take the step of instructing labs in college and working with students then. I love programming; I love what I do. The passion for programming compels me to share my talents when I can.

Getting where I am today, oddly enough, I haven't really had a mentor. Sure there were professors I looked up to while I was in college, and there were the guys along the way who encouraged me to keep it up. That's just how I've gotten to where I am - getting lucky by meeting the right people and networking with them. But there were never any mentoring programs at the college level, at least not in the programs I had been in.

So I have to ask - for those of you who have/had mentors, how has the mentoring situation helped you? Have there been any problems that you've run into? Sure, I can read sites about mentoring, but I'm curious about personal experiences as well.

Labels: ACM, mentor, mentoring, MentorNet, students, young programmers, young techies

Yesterday, at lunch, one of my fellow programmers asked me "Why OOPSLA? Why not TechEd or some other conference?" Honestly, having been out of the programming realm for so long, I'm not familiar with all the conferences out there for us. So give me links to look into these other conferences. I've already declared 2008 my year of passions - and programming is one of them that I'm focusing on. Give me fuel for my programming passion.

As for OOPSLA, there's a reason why I want to return to it. Nine years ago, I was part of a CodeFest team at OOPSLA '99 in Denver. CodeFest is where selected university teams come out and implement designs that were developed in DesignFest. DesignFest is a part of OOPSLA where developers get together in teams of 4 or 5 and solve a problem given to them. They need to work as a team and come up with all that the coders would need to implement the design effectively.

I worked on a team with two other people from our university's chapter of ACM. One of those teammates was the chair of the student group; I was his vice chair. The other happened to be a great programming friend as well. None of us had worked together on projects or coding, but we were very lucky to work very well together for this. When we got our problem - design and implement a vending machine, we had to then figure out which language would be best for our implementation and then go from there.

Our problem was not just any vending machine - it was a coffee vending machine. That told us there what language we just *had* to use - Java! I hadn't ever used it, so I learned it as we worked throughout that week. Both of my teammates had used it and knew that I'd be fine learning it, so that's what we ended up implementing it in.

Now OOPSLA stands for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications. So the whole point of the conference is to see things and learn things that are all about the OO approach. I had used Visual Basic extensively, which really didn't get into OO notation as much as I needed for the conference. So I figured out that as well.

At the end of the conference, we had to present our project. We had a lot of people watching us throughout the conference, since we were programming out in the open. There were a lot of people in front of us at the conference, watching our presentation. We also never met our design team, so we did what we could with what they gave us. It was a great experience for me - learning a new language, learning about OO a bit more, learning more about the software design lifecycle, and meeting many people.

So why OOPSLA? It was where I realized long ago that I truly am meant to be a programmer. I found things that challenged me and that kept me curious. This year, I want to go to OOPSLA and participate in DesignFest. I enjoyed my CodeFest days, but I also want to see what it's like to work with total strangers on a programming project that we have no prior knowledge of, at the moment. I want to see what it's like on the other side of the OOPSLA 'Fests. And maybe I'll get to see CodeFest teams there who show the same potential that the teams of CodeFest '99 showed.

Labels: ACM, object-oriented, OO, OOPSLA, programming

Nine years ago, I was a student at the University of Toledo, studying for my bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering Technology. I was the vice chair for the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, and I was active at both the local and national levels. I was a presenter on SAMBA/SWAT and Squeak for the Toledo Area Linux Users Group. And I was part of the Toledo CodeFest team, representing our university at ACM's OOPSLA '99 conference in Denver.

My co-op experiences started right out of high school, as a Visual Basic programmer, meeting Microsoft SQL Server. The following co-op, I had the joy of having a title that I'll never have again - Y2K programmer. That's where I met the beast known as FoxPro. My last co-op had me doing a migration from Access to VB/MS SQL. After the co-ops, I focused on my studies while working with my favorite guys of Toledo - the Arts & Science College Computing crew.

After graduating from college and having all programming co-ops, you'd think that I'd be a programmer. But I ended up in technical support for an ISP. That's where I met a friend of mine who called me a geekette. He encouraged me to stick with programming, even though I was in support.

After that job, I ended up doing my time as a systems support analyst. I had the programmer role - using Visual Basic 6 and eventually moving on to VB.NET for 1 project. I also was wearing the hats of system administrator, database administrator, desktop support, and report builder. Great experience in becoming familiar with various technologies, but it was tough to keep up with, not having time to pursue my true interests.

Which takes me to where I am today - as a database developer. I spend my days working in C#, doing web development, with a focus on database-driven interfaces. I am finally back in my element, automating things and tinkering and doing things that programmers enjoy doing. Thanks to one of my new friends from work, I'm also back to networking with people in my industry. So this blog is here to give them my perspective on things.

If you ever want to know more about me, feel free to email me at sarah at codinggeekette dot com.

Labels: ACM, C#, co-op, CodeFest, Computer Science and Engineering Technology, intern, OOPSLA, Samba, Sarah Dutkiewicz, SWAT, TALUG, University of Toledo, VB