Partner Exercise Lab: Fill & Download for Free

LabPros:Super friendly and usually great with all kinds of people and children if well socialized. Could be a great therapy dog.Great outdoors partners - love to swim and go everywhere with the humans.If correct bloodlines, can be trained in their original intended role as birding dog, retriever, etc.Easy going and sweetConsSuper friendly to everyone (could be a con for some people)Needs lots of exercise and doesn’t really outgrow puppyish behavior for 3 years. Without exercise, labs can be VERY destructive chewers.Can be smelly. They cannot resist water and this can lead to a stinky dog…there’s a “lab BO”Some bloodlines have bred all the sporting aspects out, and there are reports of some labs being a little bit “dim” when it comes to intelligence.VERY food oriented. Can get fat.GSDPros:Highly intelligent and trainable.Focused on the owner and loves to do their jobCan be couch potatoes in their own right — needs exercise but not the same way a lab does. It’s more mental.“Prey” oriented — you can train a GSD to turn on a dime and stop, just by using their favorite toy. (This takes a consistent training program, however)Cons:Needs to feel like they have a job and be trained — otherwise you could not only have a destructive dog, but a fearful biter, aggressive, etc. Needs an outlet for all that intelligence.Potential for neurotic behavior is high if you don’t give it what it needs (lots of attention - they are your shadow, consistent training, physical and mental exercise)Potential for hip problems due to breeding that descending topline. Labs also have this potential, but it’s usually due to being overweight.

While I’m a proponent of the traditional Computer Science path, I’ve seen success stories with about a year of full-time study (with the right training program).We have a couple local training academies that have refined their program and managed to reach a high success rate in terms of “selling” students to their partner tech companies.Their training programs usually take between 9 and 18 months and over 80% of the graduates land a junior development job in less than 2 months.They have several tracks - C#, Java, PHP, JavaScript. The foundational knowledge is the same over the first 3 months. They switch to a specific language after, combining 30% theory with 70% exercises (lab, homeworks, team projects).Designing an effective program is an art. It’s contingent on refining your onboarding process, building the best training program (and test/demo assignments), assessing and aligning the expectations upfront and working with world-class trainers.We’ve hired some of those graduates as well. I can confirm that they have started from scratch and gained the right skills over the course of the program. Of course, motivation was a key - reading additional resources and solving the challenging problems over and over.Earning a lot of money comes after a few years - depending on your career goals, progress at work, proficiency taking interviews (and crafting CV) and the willingness to job-hop for a while. It’s not necessarily a great strategy in the long run, but it works for the first 5–7 years.The main principle of those training programs is focusing on practical exercises. All graduates have completed multiple real-world projects at the end of their study.For the Java track, this could be:Creating a simple database and mapping all tables to classes (as a low-level API).Building a simple desktop application with CRUD features connected to the database.Creating a lightweight web layer with JSP and servlets.Building a slightly more complex web application with JSF, Struts, Spring (any framework) handling access control (different roles), persistent sessions, some basic parsing.In PHP, this may look like this:The same database scheme using PDO for database management or some form of ORM/ActiveRecord (Doctrine).Basic front-end assignments - slicing a simple PSD or converting a static HTML (with Bootstrap or Foundation) to a dynamic application (with jQuery or by researching Vue, Angular, React).Creating a CRUD web application for managing database entries - with focus on security (escaping and sanitization) and some caching and performance tricks.Porting the same web application to Laravel (or another popular web framework). Learning the core MVC principles and studying key libraries and features that come handy at work.Thе reason this works so well is the overlap between the graduates’ skills and the day-to-day requirements for juniors at work.Assignments are designed to replicate business problems. Students are asked to interpret those problems and convert them to technical specifications, further designed, developed, documented, and deployed somewhere. Using git is pretty much mandatory.Most training programs revolve around raw theory or “competitive programming” which isn’t applicable for 98% of the jobs. Being able to build a couple projects from scratch is a skill worth paying for.

Not answering when I say something to you.So I was in chemistry a couple months ago and it was our first lab. The teacher tells everyone who their lab partner is and we all walk to our station to start.Very occasionally I try to be friendly, so when I got to my station I say hi and introduce myself to my partner, Molly. She just smiles at me.At that point I didn’t think anything of it, but as we got started doing our lab, I noticed she was being very quiet. I thought that she was just shy, so I started asking her questions like, “What did you get for the mass of the beaker?”She didn’t answer.She just pointed in her notebook to what she had written down.We repeated this ridiculous exercise in futility for the rest of the class, and she literally still did not say one word to me.After I left class, I was understandably confused. I thought that she either just was or she had some sort of rare condition. However, the very next day I saw her talking while we were doing group work.This is where it gets really strange.Flash forward to 2 weeks ago. I’m at Target. As we walk up a checkout counter, my mom says hello and Molly just halfheartedly smiles back.Again, she doesn’t say a damn word the entire time that we’re there, even though I wasn’t trying to talk to her.At this point, I think she is either terrified of me, thinks I’m the sexiest man alive (highly unlikely), or is convinced that I am the doppelganger of her long lost uncle Clyde.Either way, it is the most irritating thing I think I have ever seen.