On September 1st I completed 1 year at Chemtech.

So far I’ve worked on projects that demanded what I knew and what I didn’t know yet. This is the kind of thing I ever wanted. While I was looking for a job opportunity this was what I had in my mind.

The Computer Engineering graduation helped me to learn the basics so that I could be prepared to start working.

The real learning happens when you get to the market and start building real software that controls a huge industrial plant for example as is the case of a control panel that shows to the users the state of variables scattered across a huge industrial field consisting of a lot of machines and processes. Software that you build, test, homologate and deploy in production environment. Software that is built in partnership with the client - be it through e-mail, by phone or in person. This kind of thing gives you a valuable experience.

The projects I’ve worked on during this 1st year are the following:

Braskem - Control Panel
ASP.NET, C#, CSS, NHibernate, SQL, ORACLE, IIS

Braskem - Billing and Measurement System
ASP.NET, C#, CSS, NHibernate, Web service, SQL, ORACLE, IIS

Chemtech - Site (nicknamed chemsite)
Liferay, Java, CSS, SQL, MySQL, Tomcat

CSN - MES
VB 6, SQL, MS SQL Server

As you see I’ve used different technologies in each project. This strengthens your brain as you advance in the learning path and gives you the mindset you need to carry on so that you can work in the front line with more responsibilities and more exciting and engaging projects.

During 1 year I could learn a lot of things and made the difference constructing software products used by a lot of people (hey, take a look at the about me section at the top right side of the blog). See that I wrote a lot of people instead of millions of people. Someday I’ll achieve that "millions of people" :o)

Chemtech is a great company to work for. People are always ready and motivated to help you. Even my manager once in a while helps me. He sits by my side and starts coding with me! Everyone wins when one member of the group wins. This is the thought!

All in all, great company and great people together. That’s why Chemtech is making the difference in Brazil’s engineering scenario.

If you’re looking for an engineering job opportunity in Brazil, consider Chemtech. A company that thinks ahead of its time envisioning a great future for Brazil and the world.

I could enumerate lots of good points about Chemtech, but if you want to know more, go ahead and visit the chemsite. There you’ll find a bunch of information.

Despite a great start in my professional career I’ve passed through some life changing experiences as for example, moving from Volta Redonda to Rio de Janeiro. Wow, this moving has made me think about different aspects of life. Many things I thought before getting in Rio de Janeiro needed to be rethought. In the end you grow mentally, emotionally and spiritually. This is the time in life when everything you’ve learned has to be put in action.

All in all, I’m doing at Chemtech what I like to do and that’s all folks for my 1st year.

A big thanks to everyone who has helped me to get here. I won’t name anyone. I’ve known a lot of people. People that helped me a lot.  You know who you are.

Thanks Jesus for making real what I’ve asked you, for being with me all the time and for teaching, capacitating and advising me through this journey/endeavor.

Let’s say you have a string and want to match individual groups of characters within that string. How would you do that? That’s the question I asked myself.
The following code is the outcome of some research on how to get this done. It shows you how to capture/match and name groups of characters using a regex pattern.

class RegexGroupsNames
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        // String to be parsed
        string str = "777L777_333_4444_55555_22_20090926_1727_666666_999999999_1010101010";

        // Regex pattern
        // Here we define the groups that form our string according to our need.
        // Each group has a name so that it's easier to get the individual values.
        string pattern =
               @"(?<group1>\d{3}[A-Z]\d{3})_(?<group2>\d{3})_(?<group3>\d{4})_(?<group4>\d{5})_(?<group5>\d{2})_(?<group6>\d{8})_(?<group7>\d{4})_(?<group8>\d{6})_(?<group9>\d{9})_(?<group10>\d{10})";

        // Creating the Regex used to parse the string with the pattern defined above
        Regex regex = new Regex(pattern);

        // String is a match or not ?
        Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} a valid string.", str, Regex.IsMatch(str, pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase) ? "is" : "is not");

        // Matching the string and getting the groups named above
        Match match = regex.Match(str);

        // Writing the values of each group
        Console.WriteLine("group1  = {0}", match.Groups["group1"].Value);
        Console.WriteLine("group2  = {0}", match.Groups["group2"].Value);
        Console.WriteLine("group3  = {0}", match.Groups["group3"].Value);
        Console.WriteLine("group4  = {0}", match.Groups["group4"].Value);
        Console.WriteLine("group5  = {0}", match.Groups["group5"].Value);
        Console.WriteLine("group6  = {0}", match.Groups["group6"].Value);
        Console.WriteLine("group7  = {0}", match.Groups["group7"].Value);
        Console.WriteLine("group8  = {0}", match.Groups["group8"].Value);
        Console.WriteLine("group9  = {0}", match.Groups["group9"].Value);
        Console.WriteLine("group10 = {0}", match.Groups["group10"].Value);

        // Defining the Culture to show the DateTime
        IFormatProvider culture = new CultureInfo("en-US", true);

        // Creating a DateTime variable with the data contained within groups 6 and 7
        DateTime dt = DateTime.ParseExact(match.Groups["group6"].Value + match.Groups["group7"].Value, "yyyyMMddHHmm", culture);

        Console.WriteLine(dt);
    }
}

This is the string to be parsed:

"777L777_333_4444_55555_22_20090926_1727_666666_999999999_1010101010"

It has 10 parts “groups” separated by an underscore character ( _ ).

What we want to do is to extract each individual group so that we can manipulate it anyway we want.

To accomplish that we define a regex that has the following pattern:

@"(?<group1>\d{3}[A-Z]\d{3})_(?<group2>\d{3})_(?<group3>\d{4})_(?<group4>\d{5})_(?<group5>\d{2})_(?<group6>\d{8})_(?<group7>\d{4})_(?<group8>\d{6})_(?<group9>\d{9})_(?<group10>\d{10})";

Let’s dissect the regex…

The 1st group denoted by the first pair of round brackets ( ) will look for 3 digits \d{3} followed by an uppercase letter ranging from A through Z [A-Z] followed by another 3 digits \d{3}.
The 2nd group denoted by the second pair of parenthesis will look for 3 digits, the 3rd group will look for 4 digits, the 4th group will look for 5 digits and so on… I think you got the point!  :- )

While playing with this I found an interesting thing, that is, you can give a name to each group. In this case, the name goes inside the angle brackets < > preceded by a question mark. I’ve given the name <group1> to the first group and just incremented the final number in the others.

Naming your groups is great because you can refer to them while manipulating the matched groups without having to remember the exact position inside the string. Instead of doing this:

// Writing the values of each group
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[0].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[1].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[2].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[3].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[4].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[5].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[6].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[7].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[8].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[9].Value);

We can do this:

// Writing the values of each group
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["group1"].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["group2"].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["group3"].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["group4"].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["group5"].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["group6"].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["group7"].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["group8"].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["group9"].Value);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["group10"].Value);

Isn’t it cool!?

With this you can create your regex pattern and match the groups of characters that interest you the most.

Grouping enables you to work with separate sets of data. Naming each group enables you to refer to each one of them easily.

This is the output of the code:

Hope this helps.

References
RegExLib.com - Regular Expression Library
http://regexlib.com/

Silverlight Regular Expression Tester
http://regexlib.com/RESilverlight.aspx