Can you tell us about a time when you applied computer science to your role early in your career? I applied my computer science degree on my very first day of my very first job. I was assigned GUI development work on a chat application. Whenever someone joined or left the channel, the application would freeze. My senior team members were stumped as to why this was happening. They were smart and most had engineering backgrounds.
With large-scale tech projects involving office servers, infrastructure servers, AWS and other cloud-based products, Michelle enabled DRW to be efficient and smart in how we migrate our systems, which includes getting buy-in from our senior leaders on making the change. She’s a trusted mentor to engineers not only on her team but beyond and has built trust throughout the organization by openly sharing ideas and best practices to help the operations of other groups run more efficiently.
Jen When solving a problem, it all comes down to logic – if you don’t understand the basic reasoning behind what you’re trying to accomplish, it is impossible to solve. Since I’ve joined DRW as an intern, I’ve come to understand how truly valuable logic is, and how it affects not only my team, but the rest of the firm. I work on our Research Infrastructure team, and a good chunk of my team works remotely or in one of our offices around the world.
It’s not hard to find a good story in the tech industry. The problem is that due to the industry’s staggering gender gap, most of these stories center on the struggles and accomplishments of men. Stories about starting a company after dropping out of college or while working out of a garage command attention, but they’re not the only ones capable of inspiring and exciting the technologists of tomorrow. Read more at Built In Chicago.
Carissa Miller had just finished her master’s degree in computer science and was ready to leave the world of classrooms behind her. Previously a high school math teacher on the verge of burnout, she’d decided to make the leap to software engineering with little technical experience in her past and a lot of hope for more varied waters in her future. Read more at FairyGodBoss.
I credit my career as a software developer to my parents, who were programmers themselves. When I was growing up, girls were often encouraged to pursue careers in education, law and medicine, while toys and hobbies related to technology were marketed to boys. Thanks to my parents, I was exposed to computing at a young age when they gave me a computer on my eighth birthday. In my schooling, they encouraged my interest in mathematics and science right up until I graduated from Concordia University in 2013 with a degree in software engineering.
Shannon: Udacity Design of Computer Programs - Peter Norvig My first pick, although not a book, is a great way to get experience designing more challenging applications and improve your Python skills. Taught by Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google, you’ll learn how an accomplished engineer approaches these problems. Peter will start you off with a challenge, give hints, and then allow you to fill in the rest of the code yourself.
Jimin: Going into this, I was feeling nervous, excited and ready for a new challenge. I got off to an interesting start – literally getting lost as I was navigating my way around downtown Chicago and getting used to the daily commute. In the end, I am so grateful for all of the experiences. I first heard about City Scholars back in October. The College of Engineering hosted a networking event with all the companies participating in the program.
Take Chicago-based principal trading firm DRW, which enjoyed a front row seat as financial markets evolved out of the trading floor pits and onto digital screens. The firm itself was a pioneer in the field, helping bring technology into the trading equation. And to this date, the team doesn’t shy away from new problems — or new, innovative solutions. Read more at Built in Chicago.
It’s hard to develop an intuition about what is fast versus what is simpler to write, test and maintain, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of not confirming an assumption. I once traced unexpectedly poor performance back to code that purportedly prefaulted some memory into the process. In fact, the compiler was smart enough to notice the code wasn’t using the memory it was touching and happily optimized the whole prefaulting code away!