Looking ahead, and looking back

I’m a bit late this year, but here are my thoughts on the Software industry as we move into 2015.

I’ve said it before: The talent war is over, and the talent won. Software developers are in high demand everywhere. My readers probably know this. You likely get as many recruiter emails as I do every week. I don’t see this changing. All the demographic and economic information available indicates that demand for software developers will continue to outpace the supply of people with those necessary skills.

But don’t be complacent

But, like all shortages, economics will change this situation as well. More and more people are entering the software field because there is such high demand for developers.But, unlike a generation ago, you will need to compete against people everywhere in the world. If you want to stay in demand, you need to have more skills besides core software development.

There are many directions to go here in addition to the traditional advice of learning the business and adding soft skills. Are you good at explaining software development to others? Help mentor teams. Do you have some of the specific skills that are in high-demand? (Read on for my thoughts on what those might be.) Are there particular verticals you want to explore?

Whatever it is, become a multi-dimensional asset. One day, “folks that can code” will not be as in demand as they are now. But, high-quality software people will still be in demand.

.NET 4.5 Memory and Merformance Simplified

Most of all probably already know about this. Certainly upgrading to .net 4.5 should be on the road map at some point since it has tremendous improvement on garbage collection algorithm and memory fragmentation on Large object heap. Therefore it might solve some of our memory problem such as too much memory usage, OutOfMemoryException, Overly fragmented heap as well as excessive CPU usage without sacrificing latency. As we know, if object is over 85,000 bytes it goes it large object heap (LOH) and smaller than that goes to small object heap (SOH).  During cleanup process for all generations (including LOH), garbage collector compacts SOH for all non-garbage objects and put it together so that next time it gets enough space to allocate object and no fragmentation issues there as per their implementation of mark-sweep-compact algorithm.

However, Issues are with Large Object Heap (LOH). During cleanup process garbage collector does not compact (see red circle). Reason is it has performance hit due to upgrading all the pointers of the new heap location. BUT, before .net 4.5, if CLR wants to allocate an object in the red circle area and if it is too small, it will allocate somewhere else and CLR will NEVER come back to red circle to allocate any other object. That space is totally wasted for the lifetime of the process as per their algorithm. Over the time, we will have overly fragmented heap with high memory consumption and out of memory exception.

In .NET 4.5, along with other benefits, algorithm improved, it will keep trying to allocate object in that area (any empty space). On top of that we can manually COMPACT the Large Object Heap (LOH) just like SOH using “GCSettings.LargeObjectHeapCompactionMode” in a separate thread and therefore no more fragmentation issues, less memory usage, possibly no out of memory exception (unless it has memory LEAK).
Not to mention, .NET also has start-up improvement which is very much needed for applications with heavy winform and wpf.  It uses multi-core JIT compilation if the pc has multicore. How? Compiler saves the JIT list of calls in a file for the very first time it runs, next time it reads from the file and start to jit in advance in another core knowing let’s say method C will be called from B followed by A, JIT compiler knows this sequence in advance from that file.

Anyway, just thought of sharing it. If you like it please leave a comment or discuss or correct me anything you do not agree.

Netflix – Trial Period

Netflix just sent me an email saying that my trial period is coming to an end. The email also had a link to cancel my subscription with a big red button that you cannot miss. I wish other companies did the same.

I felt guilty for cancelling my account, but since I’ve only used it twice, it didn’t make sense to keep it.

Overall they provide a good service if you are into movies, even though they lack even some of the classics.