Will Code JAVA for Food
(Even with Eclipse)
Credit: cismet_geeks

A newly-minted graduate in software development recently wrote me after finding my resume online, seeking career advice on how to succeed in the IT professional world. These were my personal thoughts; maybe other readers will have additional insights to add in the comments section:

Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning.

Don’t be afraid to research while you’re on the job. You are a professional, a technical expert, and must keep up with the literature and latest developments in your field. Search engines and forums will provide the most practical and nuanced advice, while organizations like the IEEE and ACM provide the academic sustenance. Remember what Adlai Stevenson said, “I reserve the absolute right to be smarter today than I was yesterday.”

Work with people who are smarter than you.

While I do feel the late Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens was treated a little unfairly by the webbernetting-meme-machine over his Internet as a “series of tubes” analogy, I also know that the anti-net neutrality advocate was extremely ignorant of how the Internet functions, as are almost the entirety of American politicians with their non-technical backgrounds. With the recent GOP takeover of Congress, I’ve seen numerous articles speculating on the death of Net Neutrality, but I fear it was dead no matter who controlled the government.

Allowing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to discriminate against network traffic with a tiered system would be a disaster of epic proportions for everyone who uses the Internet world wide. If you understand the architecture of the Internet, you understand that the preferential treatment of network traffic would quickly escalate beyond short-sighted offenses such as Cox Communications and Comcast blocking BitTorrent use into an arms race of ISPs undermining one another’s traffic. The elimination of Net Neutrality will quickly lead to a full-blown communications war.

What Americans and politicians don’t understand is that their personal ISP is not the only thing bringing them online services. Look at what happens when I use a visual trace tool to show the path of connections between my location and Google:

Google Trace Route

My connection to Google had to go through 19 locations and across approximately 5,821 miles. See number 11 on the map? That’s where the connection tried to go through one of Comcast’s routers, but couldn’t, and had to be redirected through another path along the network. That’s normal functioning for routers, which are dynamically calculating the best routes along the network for data packets all the time. Sometimes when I access Google the trace route will run all the way out to Europe and back to the United States to make a connection, a completely normal operation.