44 days left

Just posting to point out that there are 44 days left in the semester. personally, I still feel like the semester just started. I've been slacking off way too much. I probably should get back on the horse, but I do feel good just slacking off. I have two more midterms coming up, so I should start studying. Judging by the course content, the algorithms midterm will be quite hard.


This blog post counts as school work, right?

Every programmer should know at least one scripting language

I came to this realisation after a recent interview I had. The interview involved some programming questions in the language of my choice. Now, this job would involve Objective-C and Java, so clearly they didn't care how well I knew the syntax of those languages. They wanted to test my knowledge of core CS principles as well as my problem solving skills. I didn't get the job, by the way.

What I realised afterwards was that doing the test in PHP made it somewhat easier to focus on the logic of the problem at hand. So even you hardcore C/C++/Java/C# types need to learn a weak typed scripting language because even if you're a hardcore C guy, you might not get the hardcore C job because you failed to answer a programming question in C.

My suggestions would be Perl, PHP and/or Python.

Technical interviews

I had a very technical interview at a local startup today. I can't say that I completely bombed it, but I did far from well. The lesson here is that if you are a software engineer, prepare for an interview as if it were a final exam.

I did try to study for this interview, but I made the mistake of focusing too much on learning a language instead of the computing science fundamentals (see previous post). Bottom line is: they don't care what your favourite language is. You must be able to come up with a correct and efficient solution on the spot. You must also be able to analyse and explain why your solution is correct and efficient. Study your Big O notation, kids!

Python

As I'm sitting here preparing for my interview tomorrow, it hit me: I'm starting to like Python. The job I'll be interviewing for tomorrow will involve some Python, and I haven't done any in almost two years, so I decided to implement merge sort, quick sort and a few other things for practice. Man, the syntax is so straightforward, and it reads like pseudocode! Obviously Python isn't ideal for everything, but if you are designing algorithms or something like that, this is the way to go.

Reading break

This is SFU's first ever reading break. In general, it is pretty cool to get a week off to sleep in, but I don't really feel like I need it this semester. For me, this semester has been so slack, that week 6 felt like week 2. It will probably pick up though, I still have to do 5 papers, 1 project and 3 midterms. On top of that, I have my co-op stuff to do. Perhaps its not that slack, maybe I'm just lazy.

Foggy Dew Nachos: Nutritional disaster

I was at the Foggy Dew tonight and before leaving, I decided to split a plate of nachos with a friend. Why, oh why? Now, we all know that pub food is cheap and greasy, but come on. There actually weren't that many chips in there, it was just a pile of cheese, grease and jalapenos. If we assume that pubs pile on more of the cheap ingredients than the expensive ones, from tonight I can conclude that jalapenos and cheese are much, much more expensive than chips. Hello heartburn.

TL;DR Ate too many jalapenos, not enough nachos, feel ripped off.

Interview cancelled

I was scheduled for an interview at a certain multinational software company for Monday. I get home today, check my email and see that my interview has been cancelled. I don't know why, but I'm guessing that my interviewer has some more urgent issues to deal with. If this is the case, then I hope those issues get resolved ASAP and that everything works out. It could also be that they found their ideal candidate today. In this case, I'm happy for whoever got the job. I'm not upset by the cancellation, I'm just very confused.

Turning down the safe choice

Today I turned down an offer to come back to my old job at a certain well known video game company. Why? The people were nice, the office was nice, I did well last time. So why not come back? Because I decided to risk the safe option for a possibly better opportunity. At a different job, I might end up working with total dicks, but I want to try something new. Hopefully it won't bite me in the ass.

UBB

Usage Based Billing is the talk of the internet nowadays (sorry Egypt) so I might as well put my two cents in. Here it is: the idea is absurd! Doing some reading online, I found out that bandwidth costs at most a dime or two to provide a gigabyte of bandwidth but Bell and Shaw want to charge around $2 per gigabyte over a 25GB cap. Does that sound fair?

I see many problems with this whole thing. While I do agree that there should be a bandwidth cap, 25GB is way too low. Set it at 60 and I think most Canadians will be fine with it. Second, why does UBB have to be mandatory for all ISPs? The CRTC should let free markets control prices. IF we do have to have UBB, then the charges should be more in the area of 25 cents/GB. That would be ok by most. Third this whole thing smells of corruption and corporate interests, just sayin'....

As for efforts to reverse the decision there are four groups who want to protect UBB: the greedy, the apathetic, the ignorant and the technologically impaired.

Note: The Canadian government has taken the first steps needed to reverse the decision. I realize that I'm late in jumping on the moral outrage bandwagon, but I just wanted summarise my thoughts on the issue.

TL;DR: moral outrage over UBB

Out of shape...for writing

I'm almost done the second page of my 3 page (minimum) paper which is due on Wednesday. As I was struggling to put the concepts into prose, I came up with a really interesting analogy. When I'm writing a paper, I'm like the fat kid doing the 400m sprint. Its slow and very, very painful. One more page to go. Run, fatty, run.