Breakfast: salt-free cottage cheese with granola, fruit and kefir all nicely mixed together.
Mid-morning: fruit
Lunch: Left overs from last night's dinner, or sandwich. I try to avoid lunches that are carb heavy or a on the greasy side. Today is salmon and beets with a bit of rice.
Mid-afternoon: fruit, nuts or a treat like cookies
HP Officejet 4630. It doesn't get a lot of use, so I'm using an IFTTT recipe to print a test page on the first of each month. Trying to avoid having the ink dry out. I've printed maybe 20 pages over the past 10 months.
10 years in IT altogether with 7 of that as a Java web app dev and currently in my 3rd year of integration design / integration development. I've thought about this a number of times and I always come back to the same conclusion: I would have spent less time in a position where I wasn't advancing. I got settled it and while the work was enjoyable, it also wasn't overly challenging. I think I would have reviewed my growth more often, say every 18 months and looked for other opportunities if I felt I was getting complacent. I spent 3 years at IBM doing maintenance work of a CRUD app starting in 2008. Android was just coming out. I should have jumped into it with more gusto.
I've been at my current gig for 14 months now and I'm learning a lot every day. I do little coding these days at work, but do a bit at home just because I still enjoy it.
Desk: standard issue cubicle. L-shaped desk. Soul-sucking light grey in color.3' of space to the left of the monitors. 5' of space to the right. Storage is not an issue. Walls colored in very similar soul-sucking light grey.
Chair: Whatever was used by the last guy that was here. It's pretty comfy. Has a breathable back and is on casters.
Monitor: 2 x ViewSonic VX2450 that I grabbed from someone's desk after our last round of layoffs. Before then, a couple of 17" Lenovos. My docked T440 acts as a third monitor.
Keyboard: Logitech MK700. Wireless. Picked out of the pile that was set up after the round of layoffs just prior to my arrival. Seeing a trend here?
Music: Occasionally. I have a bunch of 90's alt I brought in on a USB stick.
No. By working extra hours you may gain more expertise but you certainly do not gain time. You can't make time, you can only spend it.
How would you reflect working 70-90 hrs/week without holidays? By having senior level expertise, a list of accomplishments and being burnt out :)
Aside from giving people a call every so often, I use LinkedIn - messages, comment on their posts, etc. I also have a group of former colleagues whom I've worked with at multiple companies and we'll get together every few months. Depending on the size of your network, it may be nearly impossible to keep in touch with everyone on a frequent basis. In the past, I would invite a number of them to tech events around the city and that worked with some success.
I use OneNote. I have a Notebook for each project I'm on, with tabs to keep my notes organized. My small team, 3 people, has a shared OneNote Notebook to allow collaboration.
At my previous employer, we used Atlassian's Confluence.
I'm in a similar situation. Diagnosed with colon cancer at 34 with a 3 year at home and my wife still pregnant with our second one. I ended up switching jobs after my surgery and know that things could flare up again. I didn't bring it up during my interviews since it wasn't something I felt I needed to mention. The focus of the interview is your skills and how well you'd fit in with the team. As someone already said, things happen to employees whether they've been at the job for 10 years or 10 months. Employers know that.
I think it's definitely enough to get you hired. It's also exactly how I landed my first job. During the interview, the senior developer that did the hiring made a point of mentioning that having a demo project showed what I could do and made me stand out from the other applicants he was looking at. Good luck!
I've used IRC a handful of times and the greatest benefit is having instant answers to a problem that may be very specific to my environment. I try not to use IRC unless I'm stuck on something I can't find in SO first. The only times I'll try IRC is when I feel I've tried hard to solve the issue without success. Most of my issues have been solved by SO. I could be missing out on a great way to learn but I feel if I was on IRC I'd be asking too many questions and not digging for the answers myself.
I thought the same thing. I assumed it was an app for dealing with clutter on your phone. I'm sure they have their reasons for naming the product as such, but I think 'Butler' or 'Secretary' or something that implies your inability to contact someone directly would have been better.
This is how I go about naming things - by thinking of an associated concept or word or image. Recently, my workplace was looking to name their new BI tool. I thought about what BI gives you, thought about images it invokes, etc. Ultimately, I thought 'Echo' was a good name since you can think of business data being the echo of business and it's not the usual 'intelligence', 'insight', etc.
I keep making terribly slow progress with Apache Camel. I also am trying to re-learn Spring MVC as it's been 4 years since I last used it and I've done very little coding since then.
Mid-morning: fruit
Lunch: Left overs from last night's dinner, or sandwich. I try to avoid lunches that are carb heavy or a on the greasy side. Today is salmon and beets with a bit of rice.
Mid-afternoon: fruit, nuts or a treat like cookies
Drinks: Just water