My line manager (who isn't all that great a programmer at all) frequently says he expects more from me, given my CV.
My cv focuses on c#/asp.net, and he has seen some examples of my work on my site. I haven't coded yet in my job, but what coding exercises could I do at home which are short and hard enough to impress my line manager?
I am nearing completion of a Project Euler problem, anything else?
Thanks
Why are you solving puzzles? Find a business problem and solve that. Save you, or your boss, a few hours a week with a nice bit of automation.
Without knowing more about your line of business and your manager's background and interests, it's hard to tell what would prove more impressive. Generally, it had better be aligned with said interests and/or business rather than just an unrelated bravura piece, UNLESS you're trying to impress geeks (e.g., my awesome work in simulation of contract bridge card play and probabilities appears to appeals only to [1] keen bridge players, writers and theoreticians, [2] hard-core programming geeks, or [3] statisticians who know what stratified sampling is all about and how delicate the issue is of computing variance &c from such samples -- everybody else, their eyes just glaze over;-).
To be crass about it, if your line manager is like 99% of the other managers out there, he'll be more impressed by stuff he can use rather than pure programming exercises, especially since you said he isn't that great a programmer.
A cool prototype/demo for something he or the management has been chewing over for some time is a sure-fire way to get noticed, imo.
100% of the time that I've actually done something to impress a boss is definitely to show an initiative on getting things more efficient. Do not wait for your boss to give you instructions, just start branching out an experimenting within a reasonable level to make your life a little bit easier.
Some things you should think of, for example, is your release procedures. Find something that's taking you 1 or 2 hours and figure out how to bring it down to 15-30minutes.
If you're using C#/ASP, you're probably using .NET and the CLR. If that's the case, take a look at learning something like python and find ways to embed IronPython for an interactive console to make really cool projects come to life.
You can definitely find creative use of your time if you just step back and analyze what you're working on and think of ways to make it more efficient.
I once had a client who loved Sudoko and we talked a bit about it. In the evening I programmed a small Sudoko solver in Excel with VBA. Next day I sent it to him and he was quite impressed.
He had no clue about programming, but Excel was something he knew and Sudoku was something he knew as well. What he didn't know was that Excel could solve Sudoku, and that I could handle such a "difficult" problem.
What I recommend is: find a project that a manager understands and that has some value for him.
I'll just quote from your question.
frequently says he expects more from me, given my CV.
and then.
I haven't coded yet in my job
based on
My cv focuses on c#/asp.net
could explain things?