What's up?

Hey,
My name's Robin Vierich. I'm currently a 2nd year student at the University of Waterloo studying Computer Engineering with Co-op. I haven't decided entirely what I'm going to be specializing in yet, but for now I'm taking a lot of software-oriented courses and co-op positions and I think I'll probably end up somewhere in software. I'm starting up this blog to try to reach out to other new programmers and share some of the things that I've learned during my co-op experiences and other projects that I've done on the side that I wish I would have known years ago.

A lot of the posts here are going to be based around some key fundamental concepts that I've learned (mostly in the workplace) about good programming design and practice. I've made some serious mistakes in the past which I'll try to share as well if I can suck up my pride enough to admit them.

I'm also going to try to keep this mostly information based rather than opinion based. I'm not a pro.. yet.. so I'm not going to act like one.

I'll try to update at least once a week. New posts will probably be a lot more frequent while I'm on co-op than while I'm at school because first of all, I have WAY more extra time on co-op, and secondly I feel like co-op is where you learn real development. School is good if you like the fairy dust-filled, fantasy clouds of computer science made up of conceptualizations and algorithms, but co-op is where you do the real work. I've found that I've learned more in my first month of my current co-op position than I have in my entire high school and university career. Now, I realize I am only in second year, but I still think that the real software design and practical programming concepts are learned in the workplace and these are the concepts I wish I had known from the beginning.

Enjoy the blog,
Rob