CSC – My experience this year

The purpose of this post is to let people know how I’m getting on at CSC and what i have been up to 5 days a week, paying particular attention to what it is like in the industry to prepare people at University in my year.

I have been working for CSC now for 4 months on an industrial placement. In these 4 months I have learnt and experienced an immeasurable amount of skills working in the IT industry. I have got to say i definitely don’t regret taking a year out from my degree (although there was times where I thought I wish I was in DEC10 pulling all nighters with the crew), I definitely recommend it.

I have increased my technical skills over the last 4 months but I think what i have learnt most of all is how a software development environment works, how people think in the industry, how people develop and interact with peers/ managers, how we interact with users. All this stuff from a students perspective is perceived as wishy washy irrelevant stuff, but it is essential (Owen knows! Owen is right!)

Linking the software development to business cases is pivotal too, as it is a business after all and we need to try and quantify the savings a company gets from better software, so we get paid for coding it! Although sometimes this can be a challenge, especially within the NHS!

Another important point to note is being a ‘Software Engineer’ (yes that’s my job title, sexy i know d:)  from my experience working on a small development team is more than coding, a lot more.  Testing, deploying code, designing interfaces and models, documentation both in and out of code, configuration on servers and local machines, management of databases and resources and user involvement are all just as important.

Technically speaking I have had experience in a good number of different technologies, some at greater depth than others. A few i have listed below:

• Programming in C# and the .NET environment.
• ASP.NET, XHTML, CSS, AJAX with JS
• XML
• SQL SERVER  and T-SQL scripting
•  using O(i)SQL/MSDOS scripts for deployment
• Crsytal Reports
• VBA (this is not as easy as it sounds)

So… what do i actually code i hear you asking? Well I’m going to deliberately leave that out of this public blog post because of confidentiality and such (:

Overall I have had a good 4 months!

I am off for 10 days for family time + food @ xmas then partying with friends + drink @ new years before i return to the routine of 9 till 5 until August.  This is the one thing that’s a drag sometimes, the same routine every day, I like variety and impulsiveness as some days I’m in the zone and lovin’ coding and getting loads of work done then some-days I’m tired.

But Overall I am liking my year out and would like to thank all that have supported and helped me be where I am now.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

Re: Dot Net is sexy

This post is a reply to Chris’s post (found here ), which spawned from Kieran’s post (found here )

The original post compared programming languages…but not in the traditional sense where one compares the actual syntax, performance, support, openness or usability etc. but comparing the amount you get laid correlated with the programming language one ‘codes’ in!

Chris makes a fair argument saying .NET is the language of sex i must say, as all my colleagues who I work with are also all in relationships (although…almost all of their relationships started prior to them using .NET, but lets leave that out for the purposes of humouring ones-self d:). And One of them is a girl! yes, a female!

Is it the parent child architectural structure of windows programming having an affect on humans mind as we are predisposed to reproduction…?

Is it like Dan Zambonini said, that programmers working with tools visually like those admin people use (including hot secretary’s and receptionists (; ) bridges the gap between genders in the workplace?

studies are needed to try and answer these big questions… d:

Thanks for the mention Chris, particually impressed you went to the effort to get a pic of me and my sexy friend lol 

The IBM University challenge

Expanding on last nights post as promised…

Thursday I went down to Southampton with a group of us from Leeds uni to represent the school of computing in a national competition hosted by IBM named the ‘university challenge’ where the top 17 uni’s (or uni’s with good computing schools?? Who knows…) compete in games and quizzes to win a laptaop each and have the honor of winning.

The 4.5 hours train journey down there was very pleasent, time flew as conversation was good – its amazing how much I learnt about global politics (a subject i have avoided in the past but sparks intrest). We arrived at the Novetol hotel in Southampton where we checked in, listened to Jazz (I shared a room with Kieron d:), had a few free IBM donated drinks, (I got the most expensive whiskey they had mmmm haha) and talked about an array of computing related topics with friends and with IBM staff.

IBM then generously fed us all a posh meal at one of the hotels conference rooms where each uni had one table, each with one IBM member of staff joining us. We seemed to have the ‘man in charge’ of uni relations as our accompanying staff member, and I heard he was meant to be the IBM staff member that was meant to come up and judge our SE24 presentations, he seems to have some speacial relationship with leeds… is it becasue were good honest unarragent (generaly speaking) hard working students, or is it becasue he went their himself? Who knows.

Each table had a countries flag and we had to as a group draw the shape of the flags representing country and cover the picture with facts abut said country. We got Finland, Matt and James gathered loads of facts from wikipedia and google via their mobile phones and used goole maps for the countries shape. We got a lot of information on this small piece of paper!

After the meal a spokesperson from each uni had to say why their uni/city was good andexplain the image/information about said country. I had a good laugh listening to some uni’s ramblings lol, “Romania!!” (was that Sheffield?) was especially humorous and the guy who spoke for Imperial College London was some kind of wannabe-neo-nazi angry arragent SOAB who got booooed by the audience and got shown up by our Joanne (: good times. We then got merry at the bar, some of us lifted shirts haha and had a jolly good time.

Friday morning I listened to IBM advertising themselves in a series of presentations about future technologies, past achievements as a corporation etc. All was very informative, and I listened keenly due to the amount of coffee i had drank in the morning! We then particapated in the challenge, we had to complete as many challenges as possable innthe 2.5 hour time limit, there were various different types of tasks available to us – logic, communication, sensory, physical, mystry etc. and we got one gold star for achiving one task and points doubled if we managed to pass one of each category 8probably awarding us for a multi skilled team).

Unfortuently we started with a hard logic based task where one team member had to assemble a puzzle, hioch was dissasembled, remember the puzzle, and then the rest of the group had to give directions to another team member who hasnt seen the puzzle to build it again. We did good and nearlly passed this task although it took ages to do! We made a hiccup on the last stage and decided to quit, therefore we wasted 45 mins of quality time. We were all annoyed at this stage!

The second task we did was building functions to create the required output. We did well and passed quickly. the next we played table football blindfolded with Matt directing our hands, very fun and Matt was a legend! We then had to design our own protocol with smell, sight and hearing as the syntax and guide a team member round this yellow brick road, fun and we did well. For the physical task four of us danced to familiar pop songs and two of us had to guess the song, we made all the IBM team in the room burst out laughing and came up with some great mimes! We got congratulated for our efforts and great dancing skills (;

The timed general knowledge quiz was next, we did relativly quite well in this stage and answered most correcly and more correcly then most other uni’s we could gaze upon in the room. In the end Cambridge won the laptops, we did well but I was dissapointed for a little while but I had fun within the two days and definently dont regret going.

The journey back was longer than antisapated due to Birmingham grrrr, but was still fun as I talked to randomers about rave music and made what we thought was a microsoft employee laugh hehe

 

 

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first post, post ibm

I have just come back from the IBM’s university challenge and had a chat with Kieran on the way down to Southampton (on train) about blogging.

I have now decided to create one as I am a geek and I am ashamed that I have procrastinated jumping on this bandwagon for so long.

Yes a short post this is due to tiredness; the temptation of my bed is far too great right now, therefore I shall expand this first post tomorow.

Good night, rabs