I’ve always maintained that programming is an exercise in managing complexity.  Once a project grows too large, it becomes impossible to maintain an image of the entire source in one’s head.  Not only that, but today there are huge frameworks with thousands of objects and methods, like .NET or Java.  Therefore, the biggest obstacle any [...]

I had five interviews on Tuesday and one today (Wednesday).  I’ll refrain from talking about them at this point because I’ve decided that discussing the interviews before I’ve been ranked or I’ve made my rankings is probably unwise.  Despite this, I want to discuss a programming question I was asked: Given a singly linked list, [...]

My most fascinating class this semester is my first university level liberal arts elective, macroeconomics, taught by the infamous Larry Smith.  I have my first midterm in macroeconomics tomorrow, which is noteworthy because up until now, all my midterms have been on engineering or math subjects.  I’m interested in comparing the relative difficulty of the [...]

I’ve returned to Waterloo from CUSEC.  On Friday, Noah Sugarman and I presented findthehotties.com to the CUSEC democamp.  We were a big hit, but unfortunately, we were hacked by three seperate groups within minutes of finishing the presentation.  Two of the groups personally contacted me with suggestions on how to improve security; of that I’m [...]

This week I’m at the Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC) in Montreal. So far, I’ve been to two of the opening day keynote speeches. First up was Leah Culver, a stunning software engineer from San Francisco, arguably most famous for founding the social networking site Pounce, which unfortunately, recently  shutdown.  Leah is an enthralling [...]

A couple of days ago, my dear friend Karan shared with me an idea about making a CAPTCHA that forced the user to choose amongst the photos of several women and identify the attractive one. This is a decent CAPTCHA algorithm because bots would be hard-pressed to know what an attractive women looks like in [...]