Based on some places I used to work, upper management seemed convinced that the “idea” stage was the hardest and most important part of any project, and that the easy part is planning, gathering requirements, building, testing, changing, and maintaining custom business applications for needlessly complex and ever changing requirements.
Absolutely.
I’ve seen so many projects hindered by bad decisions around performance. Big things like shoehorning yourself into an architecture, language, or particular tool, but even small things like assuming the naive approach is unacceptably slow. If you never actually measure anything though, your assumptions are just assumptions.
Best decision I made was taking an internship. I wasn’t really looking for one, but through some connections, one basically fell in my lap. It was in old tech I messed with in high school, so I was reluctant, but getting real world programming experience was fantastic. The team was great and I helped solve some interesting problems on a small project of theirs. They kept me on as long as they could (>1 year). I think people can be way to idealistic, especially when starting out. Go get a year or two somewhere, anywhere. You’ll have a ton more marketability and control over where you end up with experience and professional references.
Biggest career regret was waiting around afterwards for a time to try to get hired on at that same place. Not a ton of programming jobs locally and I wanted to continue my work there, but the company went through semi-frequent growth/shrink phases, and my team wasn’t able to get me hired in, though they did try for a while. There were plenty of other good things happening in my life during the down-time after this job and before the next, so it’s not really something I regret, but I definitely won’t wait on a company like that again.
Bill is a liability.
Project Panama is aimed at improving the integration with native code. Not sure when it will be “done”, but changes are coming.
Having used PHP and Java extensively in my career, it’s always entertaining to read what people think about these languages.