The Art of Being Dorian

Greetings Earthlings! (OK enough silliness for one day, back into the pocket you go Martian.) Once again I have to bring up the sort of lame excuse of being too busy to blog earlier. Well yes, it was lame too much work. Actually I killed my “1337″ Gentoo box doing an update. So I basically installed the new Ubuntu 6.06, and I am in the process of setting things up. More on the new Ubuntu tomorrow.

Today’s rant is why open source projects make sense. At least from a university student’s point of view. Undergrad in CS to be exact. All other information from me will have to be extracted via torture, slyness or greasing of palm.

Back to the topic, I am in the process of finding an internship position for the next 12-16 months. So far my own personal experience has mostly unsuccessful. The interesting part is that for the two interviews I have received, my interviewers were most interested in my open source projects. They glossed over my “work” experience, if you can call it that in my case. University courses were not even mentioned. Nope, the thing that stood out were the two projects I am currently actively involved in. For those in the unawares, I actually have 3 open source projects in the works. While initially I thought that working on these projects would be fun and simply educational, it turns out that they mean more than that.

There are three main reasons why I believe employers are interested. These being experience, portfolio and marketing. When you work on a project you have to not only have a grasp on the technology but also on the subtilties of team relationships, and organization. Any open source project will showcase your performance as a developer and/or project leader. The final product is interesting in itself. A look into your source code will reveal your work ethic, organization, knowledge, talent and creativity. Finally comes marketing, which applies mostly to the employer and sometimes to yourself. The words “open source” currently flow with the hype and buzzwords of the business world. By hiring an open source developer, the company gains a zen and almost messanic reputation of by part of what the business world sees as the future. Personally I think open source means plain old fashioned politeness and embraces the ethics of old (the “new” standard of “Western” ethics is quite dissettling). In some rare cases if the project is successful enough, the product becomes a brand onto itself. Any developer of said project also gains a certain amount of worth and can use this to his or her advantage when looking for work.

Well that is all great and everything but how can one gain these advantages. Simply put start a project for something that you need or want. Treat if it were a real life product to sell not just a “pet” project. This is how many open source companies themselves started out. Show your professionalism throughout the process. Try new things, and over time maybe that project will pay off in hard, cold cash.

Till tomorrow,
Dorian

Life has been pretty hectic recently. I guess basically it always was but I was too busy gaming to notice it. Talking about gaming I bought my first new game recently, HL2 Episode 1. Excellent game and loads of fun. Strangely very re-playable and Valve has worked hard on making the game believable with good AI and HDR. Without spoiling the plot too much, the best parts of the game were: a new enemy, HDR (kept on blinding myself with a flashlight against a white wall) and the story.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am busy working on a new project recently. Basically a minimalistic web framework that you can drop into a website or extend to your heart’s desire. The only real problem recently was getting the Subversion repository working, and finding a new name for the project. It seems that at least two other open source projects have the names simplesite. I choose a new and original one. I am not going to release it yet until I get the SourceForge admins to change everything around properly.

I have been searching for jobs recently for PEY (UofT’s version of an internship). I need the money and the experience is welcome. Besides I want to decide upon my career path before I finish university. Might be a dev, tester, admin or a researcher. Right now I applied to two different places. We will see how it goes. Also I can’t get the courses I want either (might need to ruffle some feathers in that department).

Other than that nothing much else to say. I might say some nasty comments about one crazy nation doing “preemptive” invasions of another country. Looking for terrorists they say. What a pity most of their kills are civilians. Meh that what you get when you have one state-sponsored terrorist group going out to defeat another private one. Idiots.

On a brighter note, might go clubbing sometime soon. Continuations in writing, coding and other mad activities will also follow. Stay tuned for more.

Its been a while. And the excuses are myriad. But I am back.

A lot of things have happened since my last post. I was sick most of May and mid-June. I have been working on a summer job since May too, and felt too tired to do much of anything. I seem to have balanced most things out recently though. Anyways, I will keep my blogs shorter and more frequent. Today I have been busy setting up a site for a new project of interest of mine: SimpleSite. Its in the premature stage but its a start.

Anyways gotta run and do a few more things.

Well its a new year, but I have been lurking mostly in the shadows. Nothing much happening, other than the start of classes. Life is the same as always. Chaotic. And my house is divided up into territories (rooms) held various factions (members). So far, I think the year is alright. Too early to tell naturally. But I hope that this year will be the year I really break out into the open.

Having said that, I started working intensely on a the new news and gallery pages for my two projects, justCheckers and Insomia. Seeing that I could join my work together in a simple cohesive whole, and the potential that it might be useful for more people than just me; I started a new project. This project, Simple Site, plans to create a simple, bare bones content management engine that will allow for developers to add news, and image gallery functionality into their sites. This engine will be so simple, that it will easily be modded into any custom website that uses PHP and MySQL. Now all I need to see if SourceForge will accept my proposal.

Well I am off, to play a short round of VegaStrike and work on Datasphere work.

Live in the inside of a particle accelerator is quite fast. You hardly get time to look around, but still things happen. So you are never too bored. Buts its no fun… especially if you are about to have a head-on collision with your opposite-spin counterpart at 0.99999C. Enough about high energy physics research, more about me.

Recently, I have concentrated almost exclusively for next week, and especially with building my Gentoo system. The Synaptics touchpad on my laptop gave a lot of trouble, and even worse was the framebuffer. Everything is now working, except for the blasted framebuffer. Naturally, it took nearly ten recompiles of different kernels to get it right. And a lot of searching. As of right now, I have a working X, with a minimal KDE install, Abiword, and Firefox. Its still a long ways away from the hard core developer production system I need. Fortunately most of the hard work is done.

Truth be told I have been slacking a bit. My room is still a mess, things are misplaced, and I have not touched my notes (let alone the assignments) yet. The resume still needs to be done, OSAP picked up, rides, scheduling, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. Better get cracking. Night.