nobozo

One thing I believe was true in the COBOL+JCL world of the 1980s is that you couldn't write a program that would read the name of a file, and then open that file. All files to be accessed had to be specified statically with JCL.

Am I remembering correctly?

I was part of the Postgres Research Group at UC Berkeley from 1991 to ~1995, working directly for Mike Stonebraker. To be honest, I didn't do any of the research work behind it, although I did port Postgres to Windows NT during this time.

Postgres back then was completely different then what it is now. It was mainly used for PhD and Master's student to hack on for their research. It was a mess internally and was hardly usable for production. I don't think that MySQL went through this style of development.

What eventually happened is that around 1995 SQL was added to Postgres and a bunch of non-Berkeley people started hacking on it. They did a fantastic job, and deserve all the credit for making it what it is today (Stonebraker has publically said this).

Years ago I worked in the VAX/VMS development group at Sybase where SQLServer originated. SQLServer was basically an SQL interpreter consisting of several layers of loops. The innermost loop was written in assembler for speed.

I was able to remove one (1) machine language instruction from that innermost loop. I no longer recall if this resulted in a measurable difference but I've always been proud of this.

I once interviewed at a startup. They asked all kinds of questions, technical and other, which was fine. They made me an offer, which I accepted. Then, I received the following:

"About your offer, here at XXX we have the practice of doing an induction test before signing any contracts with any new hires."

This was the first time I had heard about this. It would have been fine if they did the induction test before they made the offer, but I had never heard of it being done after an offer. I told them:

"I was very surprised to get this message. I thought I had already gone through all the technical screening steps during the interview process. To be told that I have to go through another screening step, even after you verbally made me an offer and had me fill in all the paperwork, is simply not professional.

I'm inclined to say let's call the whole thing off. It isn't clear that you really want me to work for you. Can you convince me that this isn't true?"

Needless to say, I didn't go work for them.

One thing I recommend is making sure the English native speakers you talk to know that you want to improve your accent. Make them realize that you would welcome their corrections and suggestions.

Also, there's a big difference between accent and grammar. Make sure you work on both, because one without the other will still cause problems.

Funny you should mention this. I once worked at a startup that stored lots of remote sensing data. Their strategy was to put it on a Synology. When the Synology filled up, they bought another, and so forth. Only some of the Synologys were online at any particular time, and there was no indexing to find which Synology held what data.

Plus, there were no backups so if one Synology were to blow up, all the data on it was lost.

Since they were a small startup it made some sense to start this way, but they had no plans on what to do about it as they got bigger.

This was a while ago, but Borland's Turbo languages were revolutionary.

The first thing to do is to always be listening to people speaking English. Try to be aware of how they pronounce things and compare them to how you do it. Be aware of little things like verb conjugations. People will still understand you if you do it wrong but you'll definitely stand out as a foreigner. Also, don't talk too fast.

In your case this won't work, but try to stay away from other speakers of your native language. I see students at UC Berkeley who end up getting roommates from their same country. This is a very bad idea because they won't be forced to adapt their brain to the new language. I always found that having a girlfriend who speaks the language I'm trying to learn was a good idea.

Reading books will help your vocabulary but it probably won't help your understanding of spoken language. What I did when I was living in a foreign country trying to learn the language was to watch children's TV shows. Once I was able to speak and understand at a 5 year old's level I felt like I was ready to expand my horizons.