Larry Smith Concluded

Last night I attended my final lecture with Larry Smith in Econ 102.  Larry is a professor perhaps most famous for his advising of RIM and long tenture as an introductory economics professor at Waterloo.  Our final lecture was an historical event because one of the students in attendance was Larry’s 27,000th.  As a result, Larry called the lucky student down to the front and gave him a t-shirt which said “Larry’s 27000th student”.

Anyway, Larry Smith is awesome in almost every respect.  He has a commanding presence and you will rarely be bored in his class, all though he does tend to repeat certain things too many times for my liking, but that’s part of his teaching style.  I absolutely recommend Econ 102 with Larry Smith to all UW students.  As a result of taking his course, I finally understand the international banking system, the central banks, and currency exchange.  I also know why the economic stimulus in the US and abroad is necessary, and why Ron Paul is not only wrong, he’s really a major dumbass.

Larry also gave us advice about how to be successful in our careers.   He suggested with today’s tough international competition and software automation, we must focus on careers that required creativity or innovation.  It is rather obvious, but that doesn’t make it less true.  As software Engineers, we need to strive to be more than just a coders and hackers who understand the Waterfall Model.  We need cross domain knowledge and communication skills to market ourselves as valuable.  I think my friend Andrew Russell might be on to something.  He’s going to attempt to get a dual degree in SE and bioinformatics.

Michael Malcolm

Today I attended a presentation by Michael Malcolm, serial entrepreneur and former Waterloo professor.  I know him best for founding Kaleidescape; a company I recently interviewed with. Michael is a fascinating man with lots of good advice. He recommended the following entrepreneurial books:

• Beyond Entrepreneurship
• Selling High Tech High Ticket (Out of print)
• High output management
• The Five dysfunctions of a team
• Built to Last
• Good to Great

It’s a good reading list if your goal is to build a great company that stands the test of time. Michael pointed out that his goal was always to build great companies, and not to be quickly acquired. He must be on to something, because his other two companies, NetApp and Blue Coat Systems, Inc both had successful IPOs in the 90′.

I’m still here

Sorry for the lack of updates lately.  I’m beginning to look at Ruby + Rails.  At some point I’ll write a comparison between Python/Django and RoR.

My current laptop’s battery fails within a minute of removing the plug, and the 120 GB hard drive is really constricting.  I figure I’ll stick with this computer for a while more because I want to wait until Core  i7 chips are in laptops.  Also, I’m considering moving to a Macbook because that way I could do iPhone development.  However, there are a few things I’m worried about:

• OS X cannot write to a NTFS formatted drive, which would make it impossible for me to use my external hard drive with my macbook without some third-party software.
• It is probably easier to pirate software for windows such as Photoshop and Flash.
• The screen resolution on the current Macbooks is too low.  I’ve been spoiled by my 1680 x 1050 15.4″ screen.  The Macbook pro 15.4″ is only 1440 x 900.  The 17″ is a nice 1920 x 1200, but the Macbook Pro is so expensive, it’s simply out of the equation.
• The Macbook’s video card is a crappy Geforce 9400m.  The Pros at least have a GeForce 9600m m, but again, waaaay to expensive.
• I need 4 GB of RAM, and Apple charges too much to upgrade from the default 2 GB.  I’d need to buy a couple SO-DIMMs from NewEgg.  Not a huge deal, actually.
• Finally Mac’s have a price premium that would be really hard for me to swallow.

Wow, I’m really stingy!  The current plan is to wait until Steve unveils the new macbooks (whenever that is), and make my decision then.

Inkblotter Technology

If you’re interested in the technology behind inkblotter, checkout this post I made on the inkblotter development blog!

Sick!

I have quite the cold this week.  This is unfortunate because I have a midterm tomorrow in Algebra and five interviews on tuesday.  So if you’re interviewing me this week, please tolerate the sniffles .  To make matters worse, I lost my glasses on friday, which makes class time as useful as Magikarp’s default attack.

In other news, inkblotter‘s requirements are becoming well defined.  After moving away from CouchDB, we’ve been in a bit of a shuffle.  I expect to put a lot of work into inkblotter in the coming weeks.

Kaleidescape

Today I traveled to the Waterloo office of Kaleidescape by way of Limo Bus.  I didn’t know such things existed, but they do.  They have an epic office, and the co-op employees seemed pleased with their experience.  Many return to Kaleidescape every term.  I love their technology; they create the hardware and software of extremely high end home media systems for managing DVDs and CDs.  I have two interviews with Kaleidescape tomorrow.  Hopefully their as impressed with me as I am with them.  Also, I got my thirteenth interview scheduled today, but it’s conflicting with the four others I have that day.  Oh well, time to email some people and get that worked out.

Jobmine Continued…

Today I did nothing but read job descriptions on Jobmine.  I’ve worked through about 500 descriptions.  Unfortunately, I was kicked off the system again at midnight.  Many of the opportunities are interesting, but it’s a bit intimidated to see that 30-40 people have already applied for the job I’m looking at, and there is only one position available.

I’m surprised by the lack of requests for Python developers.  Most jobs want Java, PHP, .NET, or Perl.  Luckily, I’ve got .NET skillz, and some Java experience as well.  I’ve never liked PHP, so I’ll stay away from those (the irony is PHP was made by a UW grad).  I own a Perl book, but haven’t gotten around to reading it. Woops.  Several jobs have request UML experience, which I have none, but I won’t worry about that too much.

I noticed that there were no RIM jobs available.  I’m not sure if I have to apply on their website, or if they will be in the second set of job postings.  We’ll see.

In class

I’m in SE 141: digital circuits, on my iPod touch. We are learning about boolean algebra. I’m not impressed. We’ve been using its theories in our code for years. Although, it’s likely the formal definition will prove to be more useful later.