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> Right, because there is just one police over stolen cars

Start with one and expand. The point is to get something going so you don't have to wait until everyone signs off.

> How much do you think it costs just to securely store and realtime process and archive 880 video feeds originating in a remote location?

I'm not suggesting that. All you need is a single picture (to prove you saw it), the lat/lon of the occurrence, the text of the license plate and the time the picture was taken. It's not a lot of data.

> probably only costs a couple million dollars and probably covers hundreds of deliverables MORE than just 'scans license plates'

Potentially, but who's to say that extra stuff is legal or even useful? This solution is all about transparency while still solving the stated problem: car theft.

The problem with government is that they try to do too much when a much simpler solution would work just as well, if not better. The process should be:

• identify a problem
  
• solicit proposals to solve the problem
  
• sort by estimated effectiveness per dollar
  
• choose the lowest cost option that meets the minimum standard
  
  The problem should be posted publicly so lots of individuals (universities, private companies, etc) have a chance to pitch an idea.
  
  > > we should be reevaluating the requirements of the project
  >
  > No one here has those.
  
  And that's really the problem here.
  
  I work as at a private company that sells products to the government, and a lot of the time, we make our own requirements and our government customer uses those when evaluating competitors. Since we can set the requirements, it's very difficult for other companies to compete (though, to be fair, our product is pretty niche and there aren't many direct competitors).
  
  My uneducated guess is that's what happened here. I'm guessing some company proposed a huge solution, lobbied it through government and got the contract without the government getting additional bids (or they set the requirements such that nobody else wanted to bother).
  
  This is all speculation though, but I think the OP has a point. We should re-evaluate how government chooses solutions to its problems to see if there is a chance that a less custom, cheaper solution would work.
  
  > If those solutions were effective and easy to implement someone would have monetized them already like they have in other sectors
  
  That's just not true. I'm reading Superfreakonomics right now (highly recommend, it's also a pretty short read), which goes through lots of surprising sides of a variety of issues. In it, it lists typical government (read: political) solutions to problems (read: expensive) as compared to the much cheaper solution from the private sector. For example, they mentioned that the current solution to hurricanes is billions of aid to affected areas, whereas a few individuals have proposed stopping hurricanes in the first place by cooling the oceans (would cost far less than even a single year's expenses). Here's an article summarizing those types of solutions.
  
  My point here is that anytime there's a large projected expense (such as the one the OP mentioned), it should be put to the public (e.g. universities, the private sector, psychologists like Daniel Kahneman, etc) to propose solutions, and in many cases, that just doesn't happen, so we get really expensive solutions when a simpler, cheaper solution may exist. Many of the problems government has are very unique, so there isn't a prebuilt solution already (though, in this case it sounds like at least part of the problem has a solution already).

Glassdoor.com is an incredible asset.

Microsoft has a ton of resources available for helping people to do well in interviews(they want you to succeed!), so search their website for info.

This is more for dev but this book http://www.amazon.ca/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secrets-Landing/dp/047012167X is really good and they will often pull questions right from it.

You're probably a cs student so I would go over your notes for whatever algorithms/data structures course you've had. Just because you are interviewing for a test position doesn't mean they won't ask you dev or pm questions.

They won't ask you any of those "How do you move mount fiji" questions so don't bother/worry about those.

Most of all though, relax. You'll probably ace it and Microsoft internships are a lot of fun. Good luck!

This part sticks out for me:

> You don’t just need a good programmer, you need one with good communication skills, one that understands the business enough to work with it productively and one that is savvy enough about why tactical and strategic decisions are made.

So you have someone with

• solid technical skills
  
• excellent communication skills
  
• investment in the product/service
  
• investment in the business strategy
  
  I'd be surprised if they didn't succeed under these circumstances.
  
  As Robert Glass wrote like 15 years ago in Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering (outlined in this blog post, or download the pdf version), the quality of your people is the number one most important factor in software work.
  
  I'm glad the author addresses it:
  
  > Fred George’s experience of Programmer Anarchy was probably so positive because he was working in a team of high performance programmers, who, like him, could cope with the demands of self-organized development.
  
  The author also addresses the issue of each team member's stake in the project. Will they care more about delivery than, say, their personal lives? Why should they?
  
  > Programmer Anarchy presumes everyone is their own leader, but again not everyone is like that. Lots of people don’t want to take control or drive through the delivery, they just want to do a day job.
  
  I've been the unofficial project lead on multiple projects this past year because I care a lot about improving processes. The projects have come a long way on the Joel Test because of my suggestions. Most people wouldn't speak up the way I have, but what are they gonna do? Fire me for caring too much? They can't demote me, I'm already at the bottom rung of the company.
  
  > I also bet “Programmer Anarchy” is exhausting as 100% effort is expected all of the time, when in fact normal development isn’t like that.
  
  Following through on the ideas I proposed required many late nights, so I'm lucky I didn't have a life this past year. If everyone worked like I did then there'd be no technical debt in the company (especially since everyone else is more educated and experienced than me, so their efforts would go a lot farther). Unfortunately those other people have families and shit. And even I had to slow down before long to avoid burning out.
  
  Now, I don't think people need to work as much as I did when everyone is equally invested. 40h/wk should suffice if you already have high-quality processes in place. But getting to that point is so. much. work. when people are uninformed.
  
  Sure, high-quality, experienced developers will self-organize and use high-quality processes, but it doesn't always happen organically, and it definitely doesn't scale.

I like these and would add:

3) Given how cheap they got lately, I would suggest to use at least two screens for work. More screen real estate equals more efficiency.

4) Master your tools. Memorize the shortcuts your editor provides (or learn Vim :) ), learn to take full advantage of your IDE's debugging capabilities, and so on.


...and regarding this...:
> Design patterns.

Refactoring - Improving the Design of Existing Code is a great book on this topic.

> lhs2tex has been using a similar scheme for ages, to support proper lining up of things when Haskell is typeset in proportional font.

This preprocessor was used in the typesetting of the book Programming in Haskell by Graham Hutton. It makes for a quite aesthetic reading experience when not only are the code examples terse and to the point (Haskell!), they are also typeset with wide margins and math-like formatting.

It is generally agreed that programmers don't read enough code. Proposition: code, like all reading materials, should be beautiful to behold.

(Remark: I like the proximity of "should" and "beautiful". As Wittgenstein observed, ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

Don't forget The Pragmatic Programmer

I can highly recommend the Artificial Intelligence for Games book mentioned in this article too, has many useful techniques written in an easy to understand manner.

Great suggestions! I also highly recommend Code Complete: A practical handbook of Software Construction (Second Edition) by Steve McConnell

And it's massive enough to crack your skull in if it falls on you ;)

The dragon book has always been a bit too heavy for me. If anyone else feels that way, I encourage you to try Language Impl. Patterns. It's shorter and less comprehensive than the dragon book, but it's got everything you need to build a good compiler.

Language Implementation Patterns is a good read, written by the author of ANTLR and StringTemplate. Also Martin Fowler's Domain Specific Languages book.

For those looking to write and/or evaluate the security of software, there's also TAOSSA.

"More focused" is the key point for me. I have a different opinion what that means, that's all.

See here for the following quote:
> The following subjects would be off-limits: Technology, devices, software, operating systems;

For me, operating systems are relevant to coding: they define the framework that I must navigate in order to get my code to do what it is supposed to. But I can find my OS-related programming content elsewhere, I don't need to have it present in /r/coding. But I would rather exclude too much than allow too much in - noise is distracting, and simplicity stimulates focus. If people really miss something, it will find its way in.

Regardless, I can recognize a losing battle - the idea of code reviews seems to have many supporters and few opponents, so it will happen anyway if someone wants to risk and endure not-so-constructive criticism, puns and potential fame on TheDailyWTF.

I think the whole idea will be short-lived. The comment threads will provide some helpful remarks (e.g. read Code Complete, Beautiful Books, or other books, learn about various algorithms and their computational complexity to figure out better approaches, etc.). The comments will become redundant after a while, and then people will realize that they are doing somebody's homework, and that learning good style is largely a self-study, and can't be passed on in a couple of sentences. And we'll have a new rule for "no newbie code reviews here".

But I've been proven wrong by Reddit many times before, so I won't bet on my version of events. So, who's gonna be the first one to submit code for a review?

You may have to use the German Amazon site. Give it a try and let me know if it works: https://www.amazon.de/Python-Planner-complete-beginners-building-ebook/dp/B07KBV2PF2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542547854&sr=8-1&keywords=the+python+planner

Buy the book and find out.

Seriously though it is highly recommended.

Clean Code

This reminds me of Counterexamples in Topology which is literally a book of pathological shapes and sets that frequently serve as counterexamples.

he authored this book

https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Coder-Conduct-Professional-Programmers/dp/0137081073

This can't go by without mentioning Henry S. Warren's Hacker's Delight (and on amazon).

I would add Computer Systems - A Programmer's Perspective to that list.

Jargon File 4.4.7 2003

The New Hacker's Dictionary 3rd Ed. 1996

You know, the British Civil Service kept the wages of IT workers artificially low for decades—by making it the domain of women. No, no, really: Programmed Inequality. So, you don't have to teach everyone to code in order to lower wages—you only need to teach girls.

Better yet, teach only girls and pretty soon programmers will be making less than minimum wage, because of all the tips they get. And because they don't have a family to support. And because their cost of living is inherently lower than men's.