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• Career Advice: finding challenging work in software and web development

  - by dianovich

  Having left my physics degree early, I started out in the realm of web design / front end web development and was able to get work quite quickly. I moved on to spend a chunk of my time on servers and gained experience with frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal, then the likes of Codeigniter and CakePHP and became comfortable in Debian-based and RHEL/CentOS environments. I ventured in to iOS development and published a couple of native apps to the app store too! I have started to spend a good deal of my time writing Python and have invested a little time in Django. The problem is, I still spend a fair chunk of my time doing more front end web development (writing markup and CSS for site themes, design-lead JavaScript, small applications for which application architecture and software engineering are relatively unimportant or too time consuming to invest in) in my job. What I want to do is really exercise the systematic/logical portion of my brain and tackle challenging problems on a daily basis. I want to have to care about big-oh running times, modularity in software, DRY, performance tuning and development methodologies. I want to work for a firm whose clients say: "Yes, these things are important to us and we'll pay you to get them right." But it is difficult: I have no formal training and am potentially becoming a jack of all trades. Not that being a jack of many trades is necessarily a bad thing, but the scope of work I find myself involved in is far too broad. And, there are only so many hours in a day outside of work! My question is: where do I go from here? I am starting to work on a few open source projects and have started to publish content to my blog. But this isn't likely to make it past the recruitment consultants and HR departments of many-a-firm. And I do not, for example, work in a team that practices agile methodologies, so how do I get work in such a team to gain experience? While I have been responsible for implementing version control and some solid working practices into our current environment, there is only so far I can go in this context. What would convince you that i'm worth taking a risk? What would convince you that i'll have caught up the other guys in your employ in next to no time?

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• Having to insert a record, then update the same record warrants 1:1 relationship design?

  - by dianovich

  Let's say an Order has many Line items and we're storing the total cost of an order (based on the sum of prices on order lines) in the orders table. -------------- orders -------------- id ref total_cost -------------- -------------- lines -------------- id order_id price -------------- In a simple application, the order and line are created during the same step of the checkout process. So this means INSERT INTO orders .... -- Get ID of inserted order record INSERT into lines VALUES(null, order_id, ...), ... where we get the order ID after creating the order record. The problem I'm having is trying to figure out the best way to store the total cost of an order. I don't want to have to create an order create lines on an order calculate cost on order based on lines then update record created in 1. in orders table This would mean a nullable total_cost field on orders for starters... My solution thus far is to have an order_totals table with a 1:1 relationship to the orders table. But I think it's redundant. Ideally, since everything required to calculate total costs (lines on an order) is in the database, I would work out the value every time I need it, but this is very expensive. What are your thoughts?

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