CUSEC Part Two: Karan’s Warning

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 grateful.  I was surprised when I found out our game was hacked, although, I should have expected it. Firstly, we gave the presentation to a bunch of software engineers, and secondly, my dear friend Karan had warned me that we were doing server validation horribly wrong.  He was 100% correct.

Unfortunately, Noah and I could not fix the site because the hotel took away our internet access for going over our bandwidth limit. (Note: Never stay at a Best-Western).  Today, we finally got the site working again, this time with marginally better security.  To make the site properly secure, we need to do a major overhawl, but that will have to wait because we are both very busy making up school work, preparing for exams, and attending job interviews.

So far, I have five interviews lined up for the coming week.  Finally, I left my fridge open while I was at the conference.  This is most unfortuate because I’d just bought three bags of fresh milk.  Oh well, Murphy’s law, right?

Jobmine

I used Jobmine for the first time today. Jobmine is the University of Waterloo’s online co-op job board. There are about 700 jobs available that fit into my area of expertise (CE, SE, CS). Many of these jobs are available to more than one student, but on the other hand, it’s conceivable that some companies will choose not to hire any students from Waterloo. Considering the economic situation, I wonder if the number of available jobs is lower than normal or if companies are taking less students.

It’s likely to be a very difficult job market this year.  On top of that, the summer co-op is always the most competitive, because UW students must compete with those from traditional schools who are only available for internships during the summer.  Exacerbating the situation, I’m a first year, first time co-op student, which makes me less likely to get a good co-op job, if I get one at all.  The next few weeks should be interesting, to say the least.

Also, I must complain about the quality of the Jobmine interface.  It’s ugly, and un-intuitive.  Sections of the site are located in seemingly random locations, with no thought to asthetic design.  I can’t open job descriptions in a new tab properly, because javascript is used to open the links.  Once you’re on the description page from a job, you can’t actually apply to it unless you go back a page.  The system logs you out every 20 minutes, which jarringly interrupts my job searching.  Jobmine is not available at night, which is why I’m writing this rant instead of applying for jobs!

Resume’s must be uploaded as HTML documents.  If the HTML contains any syntax error, the parser spits out an ugly error description that inevatibly complains that the problem is on line 1 of the document (no it isn’t).  Apparently support for CSS is limited (Why?), and we are only allowed to have 3 different resumes uploaded at once (Why?).  Jobmine provides an interface for adding predefined “skills” to one’s profile, such as “Java”, “MS Office”, and “Project Management”.  Each skill must be added one at a time, and selected from a giant list.  It’s a royal pain in the fanny.

If Waterloo can’t even design a decent website, what hope should we have for the software engineers who graduate from it?