See beyond the ideas—Professional advice

The University (with those capital letters) provides a wonderful environment in which students can learn complex concepts, and even receive fantastic training for a professional career. There's a great reason most decent employment opportunities tend require a college degree, and sometimes higher even than that.

But, if you're looking to make yourself a professional,  it's very important to be mindful of the fact that the university's primary functional output is university professors. That is, the most successful university students tend to be those who fixate on abstract problems, rather than the practical application of those abstract problems. Of course, the former is necessary to be a good university professor, and the latter is necessary to be a good professional.

In this article, I go through a few epitomic examples of how The University might leave an aspiring professional feeling, frustrated, erroneously inadequate, and wanting more.

Advanced Enums in OOP: Subclass Chooser

Working on my Acamedia project I stumbled across a basic yet, to a newer programmer, more advanced issue: How should one delegate the task of choosing which child class is most appropriate?

My file Storage.java represents an abstract superclass for an Acamedia user's cabinet, or the cabinet's folders. Both the cabinet and the folders must be able to take a new file and create an "Item" out of it. But how does one select from the many supported filetypes, and their corresponding Item subclasses?

In this post I walk you through the methods used for solving this problem: MIME content type probing, and a Java-based enumeration.

Check this out!