Careercon Warszawa 2015 - surveys

Home

I'd like to share with you the results of 2 surveys regarding my last presentation. The first one was prepared by organizers of the conference. The second one was created by me on SurveyMonkey portal. I placed a link to it on each slide in the lower  left corner. It was visible through the whole presentation so anyone with a smartphone could have filled it. The survey was short and consisted of 3 obligatory and 2 voluntary questions.

Let's start with the official survey of the conference. According to it there were ~50 people on my presentation. ~30 said that it was very good, ~18 that it was good and ~2 that it was week. In average it gives 4,56. These are very good results for me, thanks!



My survey looked in the following way:

• Question 1 - What is your overall assessment of my presentation on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 - the highest evaluation)?
• Question 2 - How do you assess the substantive content of my presentation on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 - the highest evaluation)?
• Question 3 - How would you rate my way of presenting on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 - the highest evaluation)?
• Question 4 - Name one thing that you remember from my presentation.
• Question 5 - This is the place for all sorts of comments, applications and complaints. Each comment will be valuable for me.

I received 8 answers for these questions. Much less than for the previous survey but all the answers were extremely valuable to me. Thanks! Here are details:

	1	2	3	4	5	Average
Question 1			1	4	3	4,25
Question 2				4	4	4,50
Question 3				3	5	4,63

I also received a couple of comments that will allow me to be a better speaker in the future:

• The demo should have been a little bit longer.
• The sample code used during a demo could be more complex.
• I should have used a microphone.
• I should have spoken slower.
• Not all terms used by me were understandable for a layman.

It was nice to read that my presentation was useful and that I showed interesting tools.

As a summary I have to say that these results are a boost of energy for me and an encouragement to be a speaker more often.

Careercon Warszawa 2015 - already after the presentation

Home

A couple of hours ago I returned from the conference Carrercon Warszawa 2015 where I had a presentation about historical debuggers. I'm generally happy with my speech. There were dozens of people in the room. I didn't forget to tell about anything important, I wasn't stressed too much and my presentation took as much time as I planned. As always I see a room for improvement but it was a good decision to take part in the conference as a speaker.

In the next post I want to write much more about Careercon Warszawa 2015 and my presentation. Now, I'd like to ask everybody who attended my presentation and who are reading this post for one thing. The thing which is very important to me. I'll be happy if you fill the following short survey:

Click to start a survey

Any feedback will be extremely valuable for me.

CareerCon Warszawa 2015

Home

On Saturday (27-06) I'll have a presentation about historical debuggers at the conference "CareerCon Warszawa". I'll tell what they are and why you should use them. I'll also explain how IntelliTrace historical debugger for .NET works under the hood. If you have time I'll be glad to see you! The presentation will be in Polish.

Conference site
Fanpage

For now that's all. After the conference you can expect a post about how it looked like.

Interview Questions for Programmers by MK #3

Home

Question #3
You found the following code and were asked to refactor it if needed:

var sb = new StringBuilder();
sb.AppendLine("<root>")
sb.AppendLine(String.Format("   <node id="{0}"/>", 1));
sb.AppendLine(String.Format("   <node id="{0}"/>", 2));
sb.AppendLine(String.Format("   <node id="{0}"/>", 3));
//Many, many lines of code
sb.AppendLine("</root>");

What would you do and why?

Answer #3
It is not the best idea to create XML documents using string concatenation because it is error prone. Besides created documents are not validated in any way. In .NET we have a few possibilities to refactor this code.

I recommend to use XmlWriter in this case because we want to create a new document and we do not want to edit an existing one. However, if we also want to modify existing XML documents, the good choice will be XDocument or XmlDocument class.

In the case of small XML documents (when performance is not critical) it might be a good idea to use XDocument or XmlDocument even if we don't want to edit existing documents. Especially XDocument can be simpler in use than XmlWriter.

Comments #3
I remember that when I wanted to create an XML document in C# for the first time I did it by using string concatenation. The code worked ok and I was surprised that it didn't pass a review :)

What do you know about low-level programming?

Home

Have you ever written anything in a low-level assembly language? The last time, I was in touch with low-level programming, was during my studies. I wrote something in x86 and MIPS assembly languages. It was not easy but I liked it and I think that every good developer should know basics of programming at low-level. Why I'm writing about that?

Recently, I've found a very good online game known as microcorruption which reminded me good old times. The goal od this game is to open a lock by exploiting bugs in the source code. In order to do so you have to use a debugger of MSP430 assembly language.

At the beginning, initial tasks seems to be very easy e.g. a password can be hardcoded in the source code. However, if you haven't worked with any low-level language for many years even so simple task can be challenging. Besides, every next task is more and more difficult.

microcorruption is a great game if you want to remind yourself things like registers, a calling convention, a stack, low-level addressing and many others.

I started playing and I cannot stop! I encourage you to try.