Journey In Tech

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Finished reading: The Problem With Angular JS

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/01/the_problem_wit.html AngularJS was taught in S2 SENG365 in 2014. Will be using it at googs for my project, so I've been reading up on it. This was interesting, as my team is predominantly if not totally back end Java dev.

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Notes: Anita Borg Sydney Retreat

I don't know what these are but I'm trying to throw out some notebooks before I go home. Transcribing the gold (or not). This will probably make no sense, my notes often make use of doodles and I'm limited in what I can do here.

Talked about innovation

Had icebreaker

Welcome address

-> learned C in grad school

-> "off the beaten path"

GHC more conversations.

Lucinda Barlow

Visualisation day2day (Something about picturing where you wanted to be)

Imagine a different type of world

Remove limitation

Engineers have an obsession with a broken world - unique eng mindset, really deep frustration w/ creativity

"I mean it was *PHP*"

Role changes everything. (Don't think about the role)

Hiring = critical.

Women should create the culture.

Global phenomenon (decreasing women).

Build for tomorrow's world.

If you love what you're doing it's a life balance, not a work life balance. Patrick Hoffmann

UX Talk

Started out in tech writing/illustration.

Boiling things down to pure form.

Very few designers -> Google Maps.

Loved data, shared the data - no distillation.  Dustbuster feedback. Personas driven by encounters and experiences, not genetics.

Fuelled by research. Go to a bar "what does this look like?"

Study the workplace environment to improve.

Fishfood - early, small chunks.

Motion test tools.

Nobody reads linearly and we don't want them too.

Bad usability = poor trust.

Iraq, US government. Sand, sunlight, bad for phones. 3-5 choices, limit cognitive overload. directed learners vs risk takers.

Follow the user. Stereotyping, anti-persona.

Do the opposite of what people expect - Apple (create personas, user test).

Challenges as a designer

emotional attachment

balancing quantitative with qualitative

lean towards qualitative

be pragmatic - care about users, follow feedback, put them first. ICI

You are not here because somebody else did something. You're here because you did you. Claim success, take back attributions. You are more than what makes you diverse. The leaders of tomorrow are the people that get [diversity].

Don't hold back.

Love what you do, then work doesn't feel like work.

Know the woman you want to be, don't necessarily know WHERE you want to be.

Apply for the job you think you're never going to get.

Highlight and contemplate your uniqueness.

Surround yourself with people who want the best for you. Your journey is unique.

Reflect achievements and accomplishments. Projects w/ each employer (list). Personal projects, include OS.

"You've got 10 year olds running around explaining what quicksort is" - CSUnplugged.

Anything we can do to increase computer literacy in this country is hugely positive.

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Delving back into web stuff

Last week I had fun getting a DigitalOcean account set up, got it working with CloudFlare and linked it to a domain name I bought with GoDaddy - in retrospect I probably should've gone for a domain host I respect more, but it's there now and has email forwarding set up.

I created a droplet on DigitalOcean which is a cloud VPS service and followed a series of tutorial on how to set Wordpress up. Was fun playing around on terminal and setting up ssh, the database, users, permissions blah blah. I forgot how much I like doing this shit. I keep coming back to web.

Due to github's sort of awesome student pack (the free .me TLD and discounted TLD is only for certain US/CA/UK universities which is balls) I got some DigitalOcean credit which means I can host this website for around 10 months. I don't technically need something as powerful as DigitalOcean's service, but it came in the form of 'free' hosting for me. I still need to do some additional steps for security to the server, but currently it seems to be working smoothly. Setting up CloudFlare was an exercise in understanding DNS better and there was a nice youtube video which helped me through over the final hurdle. So now I have a club website up, which is pretty exciting.

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AngularJS

Quickly reviewing AngularJS stuff for probable project work.

Shaping Up With Angular JS

The graphics and website UI are real damn nice, but the little jingle/intro kinda weirds me out a little. Who is their target audience? It seems to be angling towards multiple audiences but falling short of entertaining any. Who wants to hear this little jingle? I mean... I like songs and things but it just seems out of place. There's this playful aspect (also in the dude who's taking me through the exercises) but it's not executed as well for it to be seamless. Trying too hard? Oh my goodness the graphics/UI though. Hnh.

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CompSoc Update

So the CompSoc 2015 committee is elected, and the committee is mostly female for next year. We have our first female CompSoc president which is awesome. I'm curious to see how it goes and I'm really glad Marcus is still going to be there (2014 president) but he's stepped down to vice which I think will suit him a lot better.

The Computer Chicks AGM is tomorrow and I am going for president, I was going to write some sort of speech or a few words if/when I get it (to my knowledge no one else is going for president).

Committee to club theme for 2015: Approachability.

Because of how committees work, discussion, planning, discourse all often happen in a bubble. Committees try and represent the members, but sometimes there is a disconnect. It’s hard to avoid at times. And as such, I am going to get things wrong, and we as a committee are going to get things wrong. And as a small club, it's important that this gap between committee and members who aren't in the committee is really really small. So, I want to start on the right foot and encourage people to email me, talk to me when I get things wrong, or right, when you’re concerned about things, if you want things to happen - and these can be personal, or things you believe are representative of other members also. I also encourage the new committee to do the same. Example: "I can't make it to a lot of the events because I have lectures, and I want to." "I thought this club was going to do this thing, and it hasn't". And as members (i.e everyone) don’t be afraid to say things, don’t apologise or silence yourself - generally, always. 

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Advice I Gave To Someone Yesterday

Tips for a 1st year's first technical interview. Grain of salt. My own experience is limited. Stuff to be familiar with:

Looking at what you've written during the interview and working out the time complexity

Figuring out what the edge cases are for your code (can i have an empty list as input? what happens if I do? does my code account for it?)

Tracing through what you've written manually for debugging and testing

Data structures, you should only be expected to know the ones you've been taught about in python. Know that Python's dictionaries are hash maps. Know how to use lists as queues and stacks.

Be familiar with the methods available to you for strings, integers, sets, dictionaries, lists and the like.

Time complexity for sort/search algorithms, and the implementation of sort and search algorithms

Ask as many questions as possible, they test that you don't just jump straight in. You can keep asking questions and the interviewer will move you along when they either have nothing more to tell you, or they need to speed you along (either is fine!). When answering questions, figure out your process. It won't be perfect, but find out what works for you. I tend to write out all the information I have at the beginning while asking questions so even if I forget in nervousness I can refer to it! You can initially use psuedo code while working out what you want to do. You can also comment your code. Speak out loud why you are doing things, and what you are doing. This is so they can see how you think and process information, and also so the interviewer can help you out as best as they can. They can provide guidance when you need it, and highlight where you might've made a mistake. You're allowed to backtrack and be wrong, set things aside for later, all of that stuff is allowed. Interviewers are really nice and want to set you at ease. At the start they'll usually tell you who they are, and what team they're on. You might want to note this down at the beginning for later. At the end you'll have the opportunity to ask some questions, I often write down some ones beforehand and if anything comes up during the interview I might add to that list. Don't worry if you don't finish whatever problem you're working on. Sometimes the problem can take the whole time, sometimes the interviewer will keep extending the code to see how far you can go. It's expected that you might hit a wall if you do this, they want to see how you process things when you don't know the answer, how you handle stress etc. Sometimes you'll just run out of time. Also, it has been found that there is no correlation between how people think they do in interviews and how they actually perform. If you think you did bad, you might not have.

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The Computer Science Society

I just wanted to get this out here, because all my other platforms are occupied people who know this society, and possibly know the situation. There's some resentment on my side which I don't want to reach their ears. Shouting into the void:

So there's a Computer Science Society at my university that I'm a part of this year. It has been going since... 2011? Thereabouts? And I'm worried it won't continue past this year. The committee had no real solidarity, even though we've been mildly successful with events. I don't think any of the 3rd years will want to take up the mantle, and as a 4th year (next year) I didn't want to be involved in a club because postgrads (or effective postgrads, such as 4th year BE students would be) shouldn't really need to be involved. But I'm fretting that a society that I care about will falter and fall and no one will pick it up again unless someone is motivated in a few years. I was never considering going for president until a good friend told me this year I should've gone for it (of course he would say that), but maybe I should've.... Maybe I should become the club's first female president in its lifetime. That'd be cool, right? But it'd be so so so much work for me. I'm so torn. I want to focus on schoolwork in my final year but I also want to see a club I love flourish, but do I have the guts and the capability to do such a thing. Would people support me? It's something I just want to ignore and pretend it isn't a thing for another year, but I can't fully let it go.

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Stay Well Rounded

Recently I volunteered to do makeup at my old high school's musical, The Wind In The Willows. Being around these kids who love theatre, seeing them act, sing, dance... keeps me sane. Like how seeing my friend's art is like a breath of fresh air. Having that brand of creativity, that kind of art in my life is so important to me.  Don't get me wrong, I love technology, I love my degree. But I think it's easy to get so caught up in the world of tech and in turn things have the tendency to fall a bit flat. Sometimes I find myself reciting a particular speech that I feel like I've rehearsed when I'm interacting with people and they ask what I'm up to. 

Stay well rounded, connect to as many people as you can, appreciate art in all its forms. 

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Returning Intern

I was stressing as I hadn't heard back from my London recruiter for Google but I recently heard back after waiting 5 days and I think I'll accept an offer from them. Microsoft was no dice which made the whole decision a lot easier (I'll post an update regarding how that went sometime).

I thought I was contacting someone for a Twitter internship but she hasn't followed up, given that I contacted her for a status update over a fortnight ago. I'm not that concerned about following it up again. Maybe I should be, but I'm not.

Yes, this all sounds ridiculous to me considering I am a weenie in New Zealand who isn't a coding wizard.

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Microsoft Interviews

Hello tech blog I am FREAKING out about Microsoft Interviews. Ok, that's a huge dramatisation, more accurately I am mildly fearful about the content of said technical interviews. But it will be ok. I am currently 50/50 as to whether I will be offered a place in their internship programme.

I need to come up with some good questions to ask them, I am thinking ask about improvements when interviewing technically, what do most candidates forget, then on to team culture at Microsoft (is it competitive as I have heard rumours of) and why is Microsoft the best place for you right now, how does Microsoft align with what you want? In their mission statement they emphasise accessibility, and they want to make people and businesses realise their full potential. What does that mean? Why not just say accessible?

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4/2

Hello friends, I think I'll link a more official post somewhere. I think it's important.

I'm going to talk about this internship, imposter syndrome, and staring at my screen just now, with browser on one side and a terminal on the other and thinking... this. This is it. The stuff I'm doing.. I can do it. It's cool. Look at me doing the things. I'm meant to be here, goddamnit. 

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25/11

First day at Google.

I request something not so confidential and get something hella confidential. Thanks guys. But it looks to be interesting, I hope I can actually do the work though. I want to be super amazing coding sorceress by the end of this!

But it was a lot of information in this day mainly. Got delicious food. I'm in the new building nicknamed ODI. The ceiling is artfully uncovered piping and tubing and it has a pretty cool feel to it. With panels of colour and wood etc. You can tell it had deliberate design decisions made about it. Google cares about office feel a lot. There are many little nooks and crannies with candies and snacks.

I feel semi confident, like I know nothing (even outside of work and among my fellow interns) and apprehensive. But it is exciting!

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10 posts!

Good lord, this is a thing.

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24/11

I realised I said I had an interview and didn't elaborate.

I had two interviews, one was Jez who I had met at the Anita Borg 2013 Retreat already and that went fairly smoothly. I opted to code in Java and that was a bad idea. I don't know why I insisted on it either, I should've went with Python. But I did it,  conversation was generally stilted but the feedback was good.

The second one was with someone I didn't know, but commended me on my resume and the design and was really friendly, so it kicked off really well. He was ex Canterbury (my own university) and this was a stellar interview. I actually learnt stuff from the interview - setting up a default value for adding a key in the dictionary, as well as zip(). Wasn't stellar in the sense it went completely smoothly - I tended to be hesitant with some of my decisions but our rapport was pretty great. Obviously these interviews went well and I was offered the internship! First day is tomorrow.

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24/11

Ok! So I'm here! In Sydney! What!

This hasn't been as detailed or as consistent as I wished, but I am here. I can fill you in on how on got here if it seems unclear from my previous entries. I can tell you about my interviews also.

But I am here, and I start tomorrow.

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30/09

I'm so busy I can't even/can barely deal.

I don't even know where I'm up to here. Second Google phone interview for BOLD internship on Friday.

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5/09

Been busy.

Smudge - worked three days for them. The first day they had a power unit smoking so power was turned off and I only worked an hour. Then I came in again the next day, and the following week. Declined job offer as would not apply to my work experience hours required. Adscale - had a really lovely interview with HR manager and the CEO, just asked about me and what I was interested in, how I made my degree choice etc. Went in to meet the team to see if they liked me and they did, was sent a contract. Google - finally got back to me regarding an internship I applied for forever ago. Have an interview today. Been in a dilemma for the past few days with the Google and Adscale conflict, and quite sad that Google replied this late as I really like Adscale and don't want to let them down.