On Thursday, October 25th, I spoke to the CIS club at Missouri Southern State University. The presentation won’t win any awards (no presentation of mine ever will.) I put the Powerpoint up on SlideShare. I promised the students and professors in attendance that I would follow up with a post on my blog with links and other info that might be helpful.
Internships
If you’re interested in an internship with Gestalt’s Joplin office, please send your resume to my email address: jhoover at gestalt-llc.com. I’ll make sure your resume gets to the right people within Gestalt.
Agile Software Engineering
Some of the agile software engineering best practices I mentioned during the presentation were Test Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Integration (CI). Since MSSU is focused on .NET, here are some links that might be helpful related to TDD and CI:
- NUnit – .NET unit testing framework
- CruiseControl.NET – .NET continuous integration server
- CruiseControl.NET with Visual Studio 2005 project tutorial
YouTube Videos
Coco had asked how Gestalt was using YouTube. I mentioned that we used it as part of a recruiting effort. We had a contest open to the employees to see who could make the coolest recruiting video on YouTube. The results of that contest can be found here. The winner (as voted on by Gestalt employees) was John Moffet’s PatrolNet Woes. In an act of shameless self-promotion, I’m embedding my video below.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_PZ7ycmWb8[/youtube]
Recommended Read
A book I’m in the process of reading that I think would be extremely beneficial for college students to read is My Job Went To India. I’m about a third of the way through and the advice is practical and especially relevant for those entering the IT workforce these days.
RSS
There were some questions about RSS during the presentation. May I suggest checking out the Gestalt Blogs RSS feed? This feed has all the posts from Gestalt bloggers, with quite a few being out of the Joplin office. My personal favorite combo for subscribing to and reading RSS feeds is Firefox and Google Reader.
Open Source
Below are the links to all our current Open Source projects:
- JBI Binding Components
- Other Gestalt Open Source Projects
Remember to look into joining an Open Source project. While I don’t have any specific recommendations on projects to join (other than our own!), I can definitely recommend reading the book Producing Open Source Software. You can get a free PDF and HTML version of the book.