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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

I know this question is probably a little off topic for this post but I'm very eager to get some kind of answer.

What should I be reading? I'm a computer science student, I want to go into a "Software Engineering" line of work. Are there any places to read up on related topics? I have yet to find something that interests my direct field of choice. Is there one on in academia writing about software?

I also like NLP and other interesting parts. Basically all practical software and their applications are things that interest me.

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ICSE [1] and FSE [2] are the top software engineering research conferences. Skimming the titles/abstracts of their papers each year doesn't take long.

Also, they generally have industry or "in practice" tracks that have postmortems from the big software companies in case you want something more applied.

[1] http://2016.icse.cs.txstate.edu/

[2] http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/fse2016/

A good way to do that is to skim titles on DBLP. E.g. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/sigsoft/fse2015.html.

I'll suggest a minority position: If you feel the need to keep up at the bleeding edge of your field, your work is probably replaceable, i.e., if you didn't do it then someone else would do it a year later.

Instead, read more review papers and seminal papers in your field.

Ok but where do I find those for my field? I'd just like engaging material to read that will provide others insights into how I can do my job better then I currently can.

If everyone thought like that, there'd be no bleeding edge. :)

There are a lot of papers on sentiment analysis if I recall correctly. I would look into literature on parsing and statistical analysis, a lot of big data stuff is related to that and there are a lot of books on big data. Very popular field to hire people for as well, a lot of big companies want people to massage their data into giving them useful avenues for money-making.

You might want to check out the Papers We Love repo at https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love. That's my goto resource.

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