Thursday, September 03, 2015

My idea of what a Professional Computer Engineering example would look like...

After having worked in the Software Engineering industry for a while now, I am often quite surprised by what people view is a "good example" of their code work.  Some companies have differing methods of trying to measure a potential candidate's skill by asking obtuse language questions, or live coding exercises.  I've even seen where some companies require a code sample.

Recently I had an opportunity to go through such an exercise, and it really made me think about what I would consider a professionally written software project.  It is a relatively small scale example, so in some ways it doesn't have the kind of code re-use that I would have ideally included.  However I feel that it is a really good example of things like unit testing your code, tracking code coverage, utilizing memory checking tools, counting Source Lines of Code (SLoC), and providing documentation for interfaces generated from the code.

A good friend of mine made an excellent suggestion, which was "Why not Open Source the project code, and make it available for others to look".  As it is small scale, and makes use of widely available Open Source software tools, it seems like a good example of how to make use of these tools.

I chose to do so, and posted the project on GitHub.  I hope that someone finds it useful.