Back again

Yesterday was friday. I got down on friday a little too much by sleeping for about 14 hours after work. Here I am on Saturday, and I'm sitting in a Starbucks committing a new post to my long-untouched blog.
I feel like I've got a couple of things to write about, so I should do it properly - with smooth jazz and a large latte from the oddly friendly baristas.

Gi'z a Job?

When I wrote my last post, I was about to embark on a grand tour of england to ask ~10 companies for work. That was around 2 years ago, and turned out quite well. The first interview went quite well, I did their test, presented myself professionally(or so I thought), but apparently they didn't like me.
As it happens, I only recently figured out how I managed to make a pigs ear of that one. It was like a lover's quarrel - one unnoticed technical misunderstanding lead to a nonsensical quip and before long, the interview had spiralled out of control while I, obliviously, was talking out of my arse with such prowess I'm surprised they didn't hire me for a sales position (hurr hurr).
I visited a number of other companies including Altera(great place to work by the looks of it. Would not have been a good fit for me at the time). I ended up at a great little firm in Bristol: Multicom. Not many people, lots of work; I couldn't have asked for a better first job.

'Professional'

I like to think I became a professional in the six months of employment which followed. I learned the ropes, I learned the shape of things to come, I learned how my skills fit into a business and what it's like to blend fun with that which makes money.
Being honest, I went into there almost suspecting that I was going to be nothing more than a drain on resources and general annoyance. Quite the opposite happened - I gained a huge amount of confidence and it turns out that employment was what I needed to start enjoying life.
After six months, pounding out Java to mine data from all kinds of sources from clean XML APIs, ghastly XML APIs, nonsensical websites and excel spreadsheets(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_POI is decent for this),
I moved back to Aberdeen for unavoidable family-type reasons(I wasn't actually homesick).

Oops, I learned something

It turns out it was much easier to get a job the second time round. With my CV bulked up with all kinds of experience, I was quickly snapped up and now spend most of my time working on fancy geology software.
I've worked there for about 16 months, now.
I have no regrets regarding my decision to take work instead of another year at university and an honours degree. It suited me, it might not suit you, or someone at another university on a different course.

Things I noticed along the way:

• Employers are scared of graduates (rightly so, given what a joke some modern CS courses are).
• It's good to customize your CV for different kinds of work you're willing to do. I personally kept 2 CVs around. One, I like to call my J2EE CV, which boasts of Enterprisey experience and my favourite Java features. My other CV has more of a tinkerer feel to it, talking about how I'm used to a C/UNIX environment and like to play with microcontrollers.
• Software Engineering is a young profession and as such, there are lots of cults, misinformation, obsessions and unknowns. It's also strangely hard at times.
• It's good to stuff your CV with buzzwords, so long as they're accurate: Your CV will almost certainly pass under the nose of someone who is looking for them.

A start

Right, first post, hmm...

I guess I'll start with what I've been up to at Uni...

On the last leg of my Comp Sci course, I'm finding it increasingly difficult not to check out of things.

I just want the damned thing to be over, and to go and do my Industrial Placement with ARM (which I may or may not get).

As of now, I've got a _sane_ database of laptop specs to pull out of my arse for my group statistics/AI project (essentially a product comparison engine). It's gonna be a long haul of ruby, sed, bash, regexes, and little manual fixups. Really, not fun stuff...

Now onto the fun stuff...

I like progamming languages. I LOVE progamming languages, I know a fair few. The newest members of my army, being scala, haskell and ruby.

Scala blew me away when I first met it. It had so many features.

Seemed like it had all the best language features, created to this date.

Then, I hated it. I hated it for it's seemingly nonsensical type-inference mechanism, which surely did little more than to make code unreadable.

A few days went by, A few days writing 1600 lines of Java for my Games AI project, and lo-and-behold, I didn't feel so bad about it.

I concluded that, aside from a few choice features (pattern matching, traits), it should be thought of as no more, and no less than Java, but with less of the verbose crap.

I still wasn't satisfied, I wanted something different. MORE different.

I attempted to write my own stack-based 'functional assembler', if you will, which actually turned out pretty nifty.

A lovechild of Lisp(as I understood it then) & FORTH, I hope to implement it on an FPGA someday when I have money.

Speaking of Lisp; yesterday, I finally managed to wrap my head around Common Lisp!

Or at least it's syntax and actual operation.

I feel somehow liberated, even though I don't know enough about the libraries, or have had enough practice, to do anything really useful with it.

I may just be doing my next Games AI project in Clojure in an attempt to get to grips with the Lisp way of thinking.

Industrial Placement...

Last week, I finally applied for the year's placement/internship at ARM, in Cambridge, that I've had my eye on for over a year now. I've yet to hear back from them, but i've got a vote of confidence from my cousin, Ben, who did this placement a few years ago.
After I complete that, I'll have - aside from experience working for one hell of a name - a designated BSc Hons in Computer Science; Hopefully enough to kick-start my career into a...direction of some kind.

That's about all for now, I believe.

I'm now off to depress myself with HTML.

Till next time :)

Lee