grosales

Hah! Sorry about that. You are right, it is poorly formatted. If I create one next month, I 'll make sure to clean it up and take yoru feedback into consideration :) But let me answer some of your points (that I didn't do properly in my post)

- We work very hard in hiring smart people. Trying to continuously improve our hiring process and make it better. When I say the possibilities are limitless, I mean that Walmart is one of those rare companies where you can play with large distributed systems or also move teams and create awesome mobile apps, or (I believe) you can also play with robots (I have seen them, they wear hats).

- Hard problems (in our context) is improving processes across the board and creating services that need to be fast (at a very high level) while still taking into consideration our legacy systems.

- I hope nobody looks for inelegant solutions to problems. But I have seen complex solutions to simple problems many times. We are not looking for that. We are looking for simple solutions for complex problems (but you know, simple is hard)

- Hey it's better to say best and the brightest than "Rockstars" or "Ninjas" or "Jedis" (actually I take that back, I like jedis).

- Heh, you are right I didn't mention any technology we use :). We use Kafka, Cassandra, Neo4j, Storm/Spark/Flink, Hadoop, Apache Cordova for some mobile, etc

- And yes, parts of the work has to do with creating distributed services, but not all of it, Reston is a small team so far and we are also working hard to create a great culture. Thanks!

Walmart Technologies East | Reston, VA | Software Engineer - Junior/Mid/Senior | Engineering Managers| On-site - Full-time - Visa Sponsorship for new CS Grads already here in the US (after OTP)| This is a new branch of Walmart Technologies (not to be confused with Walmartlabs that focuses on the .com site) that is focused on modernizing the stores systems and everything else that is not .com really. At Walmart, the possibilities are limitless and the people here in Reston are amazin (I actually mean this, I am a software engineer who just started last November and I am astonished at the projects I have been able to work on so far and the technologies I have used). We are a new team, the oldest member has been here a bit over a year, and we are trying to find the brightest and best software engineers anywhere in the world. We need them as the scale of the problems we are trying to solve is huge and we focus on creating elegant solutions for those problems. One big plus also is that we encourage continous learning and we love it when you contribute (or have contributed) to an open source project. We want to give back to the community in different ways too (we volunteer, and do meetups frequently). So if you are super smart, like to be surrounded by smart people, and like to solve difficult distributed problems, you should contact us!

Just a note. For Junior devs, fresh out of school, we don't care what language you code in (even though we use Java here for the most part so at least you should be willing to learn it). For everyone else, we'd expect you to have a good working knowledge of at least one JVM language. Get in touch at wmtech.reston@gmail.com

Walmart Technologies East | Reston, VA | Software Engineer - Junior/Mid/Senior | On-site - Full-time - Visa Sponsorship|

This is a new branch of Walmart Technologies (not to be confused with Walmartlabs that focuses on the .com site) that is focused on modernizing the stores systems and everything else that is not .com really. At Walmart, the possibilities are limitless and the people here in Reston are amazin (I actually mean this, I am a software engineer who just started last November and I am astonished at the projects I have been able to work on so far and the technologies I have used). We are a new team, the oldest member has been here a bit over a year, and we are trying to find the brightest and best software engineers anywhere in the world. We need them as the scale of the problems we are trying to solve is huge and we focus on creating elegant solutions for those problems. One big plus also is that we encourage continous learning and we love it when you contribute (or have contributed) to an open source project. We want to give back to the community in different ways too (we volunteer, and do meetups frequently). So if you are super smart, like to be surrounded by smart people, and like to solve difficult distributed problems, you should contact us!

Just a note. For Junior devs, fresh out of school, we don't care what language you code in (even though we use Java here for the most part so at least you should be willing to learn it). For everyone else, we'd expect you to have a good working knowledge of at least one JVM language.

Get in touch at wmtech.reston@gmail.com

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. I read this book 8 years ago and I still feel like quoting it sometimes. It's not just a biography but a well researched work on the history of the later part of computing history. http://www.amazon.com/The-Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution...

Thank you John McCarthy. For your work, for your relentless curiosity, and inventiveness that helped us all. Without knowing, you set the path for many of us.

I still remember the first time I picked up K&R. I tried my best to devour it. The technical prose makes the book a tour de force. Every time I write a new "hello world" program from now on, I will add a "Thanks dmr" at the end. May you rest in peace dmr.

My most sincere condolences. May the inspiration she instilled in you be eternal.

I did that as a mid level dev. I had timing on my side though. I waited until we finished a big project, and then I presented my two week letter and went on a month long trip. I came back and found a job almost immediately. My point being that when your body asks you for change, do not hold back, and make that change. Be confident in your skills and don't be afraid of telling your boss that you need a break. Because even though the Germans may think so, we are not robots.

Man, you keep making it on Wednesday. I would love to attend but all my soccer league games are on Wednesday. Hopefully the March one is before the 16th.

I sincerely hope everything turns out ok buddy. Take care, and remember, your health should always be your top priority.

I will be there.

You might want to read Tuva or Bust! by Ralph Leighton. It features Feynman as he and Ralph planned their trip to Tuva. With that said, it's a good book but I prefer the first two books because they are more about Feynman's thoughts and ideas than anything.

This is my little "bunker":

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3379/4573463000_c7293409c0_o....

I have white boards on both sides of the room, and a mono laser printer that does not appear in the picture.

I have many dreams, not one specific goal has determined what I do in my life. It's a juggling act though, to work hard so some of them become reality, and hope that other people will take on the rest of my dreams (because I also know I won't be able to do it all myself). Regarding American Dreams, as an immigrant to this country, strangely I have none. I have learned so much while living here, I think that is an undeserving gift to me. My american dream is that America can evolve and find new ways to prosper, innovate while never forgetting the real reasons their founders fought for. The same way, many things can make me happy:just seeing a sunset or a sunrise or just the clear clouds after rainy days or seeing that my cousins learned something after a turbulent programming class.

If you'd like to understand a little bit about how our brain might process and understand numbers, get "The Number Sense" by Stanislas Dehaene

I'd have to agree with you on this. I read this book last year (got one of my coworkers to read it too) and I was so surprised at how awesome it was that I got "What Do You Care What Other People Think ?" and "Tuva or Bust". Both are really good books because you get to learn more about Richard Feynman and the way he thought about different things ("Surely" is a unique gem though). This particular chapter prompted my attention and by trying to find references online, I ended up at gorgora.com. I didn't want to reference a place I was not sure of so I did not. In hindsight, I should have written a blog post about it. Fortunately, according to whois the site will soon be down (unless my intuition is wrong about what "pending renewal or deletion" means).

I worked with shanked on the prototype. But mostly it was all his work. We picked up again this week.

These are very sad news. I truly hope he can beat it.

Anything can useless when you don't know how to use it correctly.

Some people find joy in different things. It seems that at this juncture of your life you are trying to analyze what and why you are doing what you are doing and where do you want to end up. I feel that I am to young and inexperienced to be giving this kind of advice, add to that the fact that I don't know you and I don't like to give generalized advice. If I was in your case, I'd like to think that I would do what my heart is telling me to do. If I do that, I will know that I will be happy if I follow that path and because of that, it will reflect towards my family. If I am a creator and I don't create, I will be a sad panda. Good luck for you with whatever choice you make.

Wow buddy, you need to go back to reddit, Digg (seeing that those are the type of places where you see this kind of comments more often) or whevever you came from.

Wasn't Fred Brooks who said something along the lines of "always build one to throw away"? Even though, this is not supposed to be a satire (or is it?) , the fact that software engineering is a very young subject needs to be taken into consideration. On the other hand, We need failed software projects to know what not to do.

Happy, Happy, Happy birthday! Hope you have a blast of a day!

Thank you sir! A Lisp book is always welcome.

moosecake, You need to ask yourself what motivates you. Why do you find some stuff more worthwhile than other stuff? When you work on something that is not worthwhile, can you find the bits that can be worthwhile to you?

In my case, even the most mundane work has something to teach me. If it's not by doing it myself is by doing it with other people (I like to see how other people solve problems). So here is an idea, get together with friends and work on the stuff you find unappealing. That way, you'll throw two birds with one stone. You'll learn to work better as a team, and you'll get the unappealing work out of the way. Also, I find it better to finish the boring work first thing, and then move on to the cool work (that way the cool work seems like a prize). Good luck, and don't forget to have fun, you are still a kid above everything else.

The last part of this Radiolab episode features EMI. Overall it's a very interesting talk.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21

I think for me, it was the same thing while learning calculus than anything else I have learned. I had to do a lot of exercises to really get the material. The chain rule for instance, seemed alien to me initially. It wasn't after I decided to do a lot of the problems at the end of the section that I truly could see the pattern. With me, I tend to only see patterns that I know exist (although sometimes my brain confabulates and confuses me).

May he rest in peace. For the ones he left, my most sincere condolences.

Wonder how you can use the word "penguin" as a curse word...

Pretty cool, I was learning Vim through "A Byte of Vim" at http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim