I am posting to share what I'm doing these days with programming. I am working for the same company I did last summer, Small Craft Engineering.
Last summer I implemented vibration analysis inside POWERSEA to predict the health effects of seated occupants in SOCOM vessels (Navy seal patrol boats that go 40kts).
This summer I'm augmenting the CAD functionality of POWERSEA. Thus far I've re-written the routines in for POWERSEA's AutoCAD .dxf format. I've also implemented interactive support for panning/zooming/rotating the viewport, etc, to mimic AutoCAD. POWERSEA is about 12 years old and wasn't originally designed to be interactive.
POWERSEA also isn't particularly pretty looking as far as applications go (it's a scientific tool for predicting ship's motion in waves).
I've had to do a lot of heavy-duty work with both OpenGL and MFC, windows messaging, etc. I've also learned a lot about how compilers work, in the computer science sense, due to the fact that the numerical integrator and the front end of the application are written in different languages, and linking them gets...interesting. The numerical integration is done using IMSL written in fortran 77 (and the front end is obviously C++).
I am also learning how to direct the simulation episodes from VB scripts executed in Excel. This is done because a lot of the simulation episodes that my employer needs to perform take all night to execute, and we need to conditionally feed parameters to the simulation based on previous results.
And the icing on the cake is that he's offered to pay for me to get a master's at either the University of Maine or MIT! Granted I doubt I'd be able to get into MIT.
