Posts Tagged: rant

career / Off-Topic — No Comments
31
Dec 11

Ringing in the New Year by seeing out the old

2011 has been a great year for me;

  • Graduated with a 1st MEng in Electronics & Software Engineering @QUB,
  • Got Job offer to a major financial house, which I turned down,
  • Got Job offer to a C|EH company in England, which I turned down,
  • Got DELNI Funded PhD offer (x4) from CSIT/ECIT, which I turned down,
  • Got selected to be one of the two UK projects within a Joint UK/FR Defence PhD Programme, which I accepted,
  • Saw fantastic growth in QUESTS and the Hacker^H^H^H^H^H^HMakerspace, including the beginning of a Major project, which we got EEECS Funding for and are also hoping to get QAF funding for QUESTS in general,
  • We are on track to get a actual space for the Makerspace circa Summer 2012,
  • Had the fantastic experience of living and working in Zurich for the summer with IAESTE / Pc Engines Gmbh, which gave me the opportunity to visit all over Europe, which was great for my confidence and self-belief, and also gave me a great many new friends all over the world,
  • Started (re-)learning French,
  • Came second in the UK Nationals of the IET’s Present Around the World Competition in Liverpool for my talk on Privacy in the Modern world (I keep meaning to screen-cast this but keep forgetting…)
  • Had a great time making an interesting site with Matt Campbell, Alastair McKinley, and the Sisk Brothers (was live for a few days over the summer, and we didn’t want to pay for it so let it die; may go back to it this year!)
  • Was asked to speak at the QUB EEECS RS Colloquium, representing Digital Communications within QUB/ECIT.
  • Travelled over 6,000 Miles, visiting at least 12 cities in 7 countries.
  • Lost a phone and a bike,
  • Went on 12 ‘dates’, 5 of which were worth while, 3 of which I’m still in touch with,
  • Taught at least 5 first years that C++ isn’t magic, it’s just poorly taught,
  • Sat on 5 committees, only one of which made me feel productive,
  • Had a pretty awesome time.

Going forward, I’m not going to make a load of promises I won’t keep. Thanks to all my friends, family, colleagues, competitors, enemies, bureaucrats, pencil-pushers, and random-folk who made my year what it was.

I plan on only two things;  KISS, and…

Commentary / Off-Topic — No Comments
17
Oct 11

Today’s Accomplishments: The 2.0 Generation

As I was walking back from our kitchen in the office, I realised that that ‘lift coffee cup, walk to kitchen, make coffee cup, return to desk’ was the most inefficient part of my working day; I can even justify writing this post as vaguely productive as I’m waiting for a download to complete…
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Commentary / Off-Topic — No Comments
12
Feb 11

Bolsters Code-Related Rants (An ongoing collection)

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  • Logging functions being called with just a variable and no comment as to what the hell it is
  • logging has functions more than logging.info, use them.
    • Debug = useful information if something breaks but isn’t interesting during normal operation
    • info = useful and generally interesting information
    • warn = something went wrong, indicating something should probably be refactored / fixed, but the system could recover from it.
    • error = oh dear jesus fuck the entire site evaporated into a swarm of zombie locusts, I better put something in the error log.
  • Commented out historical code! Using a version control system means you can go back to any point in the history of the codebase and see how we used to do something; you don’t need dozens of lines of extraneous code ‘just in case’
  • Checking in inoperable code to the default branch (I know I’m guilty of this sometimes too). If major changes to one section are being made, do it in a branch, that’s what branches are there for. Then, when the new functionality is stable, update your local code with respect to the default branch, then make sure all the functionality still works and only then commit and check it in to default
  • Non existent or orphan files; if you add a new file,hg add $filename before updating or committing, otherwise noone has any idea whats going on. Ditto removals of files, its hg remove $filename ; rm $filename, not the other way around.

You guys got any to add? I’ll be adding to this as I think of them… / come across them…

Commentary / Off-Topic / Uncategorized — No Comments
8
Jan 11

Rant: Job Applications

Inspired by Barry Haughey’s recent facebook post;

Dear International Banking Conglomerates and other major employers,

I just spent 3 hours of my life writing custom cover letters, answering pointless assessment questions, and entering my ‘skillsets’ on 4 different occasions for an application for one job… Just gimme the bloody job already; you’re big enough and ugly enough to have been able to pick up all that infomation from either a) My extensive and detailed resume, b) my attached university transcript.

For companies whose bread and butter is data management and analysis, wise the hell up;

Why not just pull all the information from my LinkedIn page?

What about having a standardized assessment test that everyone can use, and do, ONCE, and then you pull their score from that profile?

What about taking all that time that people waste putting THE SAME INFORMATION over and over and over again, and using that time to, I dunno, study to get a better degree?

That way, you get the BEST candidates, not the ones who spray their CV’s around like a bedwetting ADHD-sufferring 5 year old.

Yours Exhaustedly

Andrew Bolster

Off-Topic — 7 Comments
24
Mar 10

My Experience with Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx

Updates(26/3/10): Thought I’d give the liveCD another go (this time using the dailyx64 image and using unetbootin), thinking it must be something simple; so during boot i just kept pressing escape, before the splash screen came up. This got me around the splash screen issue and it seems as if everything is fine. Also, I found a matching bug report on launchpad, but no resolution as of yet. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Updates(25/3/10): With the greatest thanks to the guys at serverfault, I’ve still not been able to fix this issue, and will be lodging a bug report to launchpad whenever I get a chance

I’m a big Ubuntu fan; have been since my first Dapper Drake install, but I have never had such weirdness as I’ve had so far with Lucid.
I am at a loss to explain or even describe the trouble I’ve had with this.

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