Saturday, December 29, 2007

The Revival

Alrighty, long hiatus. I lost interest, and life got very, very busy.

Things that have happened as time elapsed:
  1. Spent the entire summer puttering around at work, running tests, doing tests, writing documents, working hard. I learned a lot about Q/A testing, web frameworks, and how Java based software should definitely be avoided unless you have a terabyte of RAM, and God's brain as a processor.
  2. Spent all that free time after work NOT learning C++ as planned, but rather, puttering around with friends. Definitely had some fun times. Ate at great restaurants, but alas, there is very little fun to be had in the city of Toronto (in comparison to the great city of Montreal!;))
  3. Finished my work term, had the option of coming back on my next work term. I had to think hard about it, and I was really scared of saying no. I liked working there, but I thought it was time to challenge myself and try out for software developer positions. So after long debate, I declined their offer, and set out on a different path. While back at school, I had about 10-14 personal/group/phone interviews with many companies. I totally, completely embarrassed myself in one of them. This particular one was with a great, huge, well-known employer, offering about 20-30$/hr USD. I didn't know it was a technical interview, so I hadn't prepared, and I completely forgot...EVERYTHING. "In Java, how do you implement a linked list?" UMMM... shit. Having done nothing but testing that summer, I completely forgot the most basic syntactical rules and basic data structures. Then I was asked to implement something with recursion. Oh, it was all fine and dandy till i realized that, OOPS, I didn't end up making a recursive method at all, but just a regular stupid o(n^2) method. Oyyyy. Anyway, I learned from that and the next interviews were much better. I landed a job as a Python programmer. Now, if only I knew Python...
  4. The study term ended with complete shit marks. Totally my fault. I took a much too heavy course load, mixed in with a lot of nothing, emotional distress and fooling around. Now, learning Python (which, by the way, is AMAZING and everyone should learn it. Especially beginners; it's quick, intuitive, clean, and beautiful) and other stuff.
Now, I'm busying myself with preparations for the new work term! Hopefully, I won't be useless. That's my major fear. Being a n00b and getting this kind of a position kind of REALLY scares me, but you know... my employers seem really cool. I hope I don't let them down!

NB: I can't dual boot Linux and Windows for the life of me. After defragmenting, there's some weird system error that refuses to let me partition. Now, I have to settle for VMware until I can resolve this. But god, my computer is seemingly too slow for VMware...

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