Intro to 'My experiments with ETrue && EFalse'

I am working in Symbian, a leading mobile OS company. I have been thinking of blogging about my experience in my first employer in IT industry for few weeks now. I got my first cell phone here(I could make free calls too). I could have had a fatter wallet (though I never had it except on the day of salary). I could do so many things that I could not do before. It was great fun during the training (I learnt how to play games such as Minesweeper and copter and I also polished my skills in TT and solitaire). It was like, I was getting paid for doing nothing that could be deemed useful.

After this period of sweet sixty days though, it was serious work. Life has become much more mundane after I started earning my bread. I missed so many things that I took for granted during my college days. I could not bunk and sit in the parking lot whenever I wanted to. I could not say 'Oh, I forgot to do this 'cos of '. There were no birthday bumps to be given or taken. I could not tease my favorite teasing targets in their face whenever I wanted to(my classmates from graduation days- commu, sat, kau etc).

I developed a new habbit of dozing during my 25km long commute (I came to know the completion of Marathalli flyover's construction after a week of its completion. It was my cab-mate who told me that as I had forgot about it during my daily excursion into my dream world whenever the cab passed through that route). For the first time in my life, I was interested in what was happening in a Radio station (thanks to our cab driver who liked a particular radio station very much). I had to battle with the finger print reading machine at the office entrance everyday to get in and out of office.

But, the 'real world out there' offered a lot of lessons for me to learn as well. My notion of being a good programmer with good programming skills came crashing right down in front of my eyes as I understood that whatever I had done during my graduation days was utter bull shit. I had done no more than scratch the surface of the mother earth with a shovel. I learnt a lot about good programming practices, efficiency, memory management etc.

Symbian C++ is an altogether different ball-game when compared to C++. So many things that nobody usually bothers about when writing C++ programs have to be addressed while developing a Symbian C++ application. I got the first real shock of my programming life when I learnt that programs in Symbian C++ did not start the way they usually do in C++. The absence of
#include
/* and */
void main()
{
}
was really the shock of my life time that I took 2 days to recover from. I was oblivious to the presence of a stack and heap for each process. There were so many thigns to learn and so little time. In my 10 months experiece (till the date of writing this) I might have again done as much as dug a feet or two deeper into the earth.

I will try to share some more experiencees, tips about Symbian C++ and programming in general in my succeeding blogs.

Regards,
Anirudh