Finding a Programming Job in Irvine, CA

If you’re in the job market in Southern California, finding web developer jobs in Irvine will be very competitive.  This article will help you get ready for that search!I’ll bet you didn’t know that programmable computers have been around for hundreds of years?  Not electronic computers, to be sure, those are invention of the 20^th century, but we can go as far back as the 1200’s to find examples of programmable machines, the first of which was a human-shaped automaton that could be made to play different rhythms on a set of drums when movable pegs’ positions were changed on its gears.  The first real modern computer is very famous- the Jacquard loom was invented in France in 1801.  This machine had a slot for a punch card, and depending on what holes were punched out of the punch card, different patterns would be woven into the fabric.  Some of these looms are still in use today.

At the turn of the century, Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which would eventually become International Business Machines, commonly referred to nowadays as IBM.  He continued the use of punch cards for programming, and that was used as an input to computers all the way through the 1970’s.  Punch cards contributed a major advance to the science of computing-for the first time, the whole machine didn’t have to be reconfigured to run different programs.

In the 1950’s the first higher-level computer programming language- known as Fortran- came on the scene.  This was s huge advance, because it allowed its users to enter instructions in algebraic terms (such as x+7 = 9).  These instructions were then “compiled” into machine language, used by the machine to carry out computations.  At this point in the computers’ history, instructions were still entered using punch cards or “tape”.  By the end of the 1960’s, however, computers had for the first time advanced to the point where instructions could be typed on a keyboard right into the machine, due to advances in materials and dropping component prices.

The five most important elements of any computer program are

• Efficiency: the amount of system resources a program consumes-the less the better.
• Reliability: how often the results of a program are correct.
• Robustness: how well a program anticipates situations of data type conflict and other incompatibilities that result in run time errors and program halts.
• Usability: the clarity and intuitiveness of a programs’ output can make or break it's success. This involves a wide range of textual and graphical elements that makes a program easy and comfortable to use.
• Portability: the range of hardware and OS platforms on which the source code of a program can be compiled and run.

The steps of development of a software program are usually:

• Requirements Analysis- what does the software need to do?
• Modeling- anticipating usage scenarios
• Implementation- bringing the software on line
• Failure Elimination- debugging and further testing

The march of technology is seemingly unstoppable, and the computer is no exception- in fact, many modern scientific advances wouldn’t have been possible without the computer.  Computers nowadays work on quite an abstract level- a person could conceivable write whole pieces of software without actually learning machine language, at all!  What this has meant is that modern computers require more resources; however, it also means that the process of programming has been streamlined for veterans, and that barriers to entry for novice programmers are also rapidly falling, leading to an increase in demand for programming experts throughout the developed world.