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Category Archives: Personal

Nearly A Month… Really? (Random Update Post)

So it’s been pretty close to a month since I updated.  Pretty poor effort on my part I suppose.  I haven’t been playing much Gears of War… which as my wife will tell you, is a pretty clear indicator as to how much free time I have.  There’s a lot of random stuff I want to say so I’ll just bullet point it all.

    • Went to NY
      • The Central Park Zoo is pretty cool
      • Polar bears are awesome, this one was doing laps and scratching his back on the wall
      • The Waldorf=Astoria is nice, but not nice enough to justify the price.. there was a big model competition while I was there.  I’ve never seen so much luggage in all my life.  I now wish I had taken a picture, it was unreal.
      • A lot of walking around town, which was fun
    • Finished semester last week
    • Got a 3.9! Whee!
    • Thoughts on the semester….
      • Operating Systems course was weak.  The professor had a distributed systems background, but was pretty light on OS knowledge.  However, the book was great.. reminder to self.. read the book in free time
      • Interactive Graphics was a lot of fun and a great learning experience..  The projects were very time consuming, it can be difficult to debug 3D programs.  Teacher provided most of the notes, which I like.. lets me focus on the lecture.
      • Comparative Programming Languages .. everyone was lost!  We got hung up on the implementation details of ML for a few weeks.  The course isn’t in depth enough that I could write my own compiler.. it’s also too in depth to be useful day to day.  The university should probably just ditch this and offer a course that provides a simple overview of language features along with an optional course in compilers.
      • Functional Programming was a really enlightening course.  It felt great to think about programs in a different way.  Everything recursive ends up being so elegant in a functional language.  Definitely going to keep my feet in the functional pool.
      • Statistics 2 .. it was statistics.. :)
    • Taking the summer off of school
    • Landed an internship
      • Only been there a week, but definitely having fun
      • So far, writing some simple JavaScript

Speaking of JavaScript, there’s a fantastic series of videos on Yahoo Video with Douglas Crockford.  It takes a lot of time to watch them, but you will definitely learn something.

This ended up being really long, I should probably avoid bullet points from now on.

Career, Interviews, School

Been a busy couple of weeks. I attended a career fair at my school. I was able to scout the participants early on and narrowed my focus to just one company. Most of the companies there were looking for helpdesk or software support staff. Been there, done that. Anything other than an internship in software engineering/development would be a waste of time.

From the career fair I landed an interview, which I think went well. I did suffer a slight brain freeze on parts of the technical interview, but overall I thought it was positive. There’s nothing more frustrating than realizing an answer to a question on your way out or long after it’s been asked (ie 6/10 = 3/5, 6/15 = 2/5, 2/5+3/5 = 5/5)… I also got the normal questions that interview guides tell you to avoid answering at all costs (pay, current offers, etc). I had trouble stonewalling the interviewer on those questions, it’s just not in my personality. Hopefully they see my honesty and forthrightness as an asset. I should know in the next week or so if they feel I’m right for the job. (fingers crossed)

My career services department has sent my resume to a few places as well. Only one of which looked interesting. I’ll know in a few days whether I’ve been pre-selected for an interview.

In the mean time I’m continuing to seek out opportunities. One thing I’ve learned from this experience… don’t just look at Monster, Dice, etc. When I first began looking I got pretty worried as there wasn’t a lot in the area. Directly visiting an employer’s website produced a lot more results.

All in all, internship or no internship.. it’s been an enlightening experience. Interviewing reminded me of just how far I’ve come in the past few years. I can still remember my first real interview, what a disaster that was. I had no idea what I was doing!

Goodbye and Hello

Recently I’ve felt a need to get myself out on the web. I have another site, but sharing the URL always forces me to explain it. This site will attempt to carry a little more professionalism without being overly stuffy. I hope to post about what’s going on in my life, specifically my hobbies and desired career path.

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