Tag Archives: projects

Grey Morning in a New Reality

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Outside the window, grey clouds fill the sky and raindrops stream through the air.  A warm morning for an early December day, the weather being more likely for mid-November.  The rain does not bother me as I am sitting in a GO train headed to downtown Toronto, and getting ready for the start of a new day.

Since I started working at Indusblue as an Android developer, my mornings involve a morning train commute to Toronto.  While taking the train and streetcar to work extends my commuting time, I can not complain.  I get about two hours each day of time for myself, to get work done.  Amongst other things, I use this time to write or catch up on past work.  Today I decided that instead of sleeping on may to work, I would update this blog.

After a summer of travelling to and from San Francisco and spending a good portion of my Fall travelling in central Europe: Poland, Germany, Austria and Italy; I finally am settling down at the end of the year.  While I love travelling and visiting new places, I am glad that I have returned to Toronto.  I am glad to be close to most of my friends, family and familiar settings.

Since my return, I have concentrated on catching up on overdue work.  So many tasks and delayed projects have piled up, that I feel the need to make progress on them or even finish them before the end of the year.  Amongst other things I started writing two pieces: a science fiction novel and an auto-biography of sorts.  Also I started working on justcheckers again, which I plan to complete as part of my portfolio work.  And I am working on a few other missing or lacking parts of life, that I can not comment on right now.  However I am overjoyed with the progress I have made, and the opportunities that linger on the horizon.

So while the mornings are grey and rainy and sometimes quite cold, I am grateful for the new reality of life I am in now.  It might rain outside, but I feel as if it were sunny.

Daily Writing

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I’ve done a lot of thinking today.  About what to do next in life, and what will be the next big thing.  I feel that I should seriously back into writing in a big way.  Managing all the projects that I’d like to do will be challenging.  But I think I should try and dedicate one day of my week for a particular project.

But one thing I will do, is do some daily writing.  I should be able to manage, cause after all I am posting this even though it has been an off day.

Like a Sitcom

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Yawn. Nothing is worse than a bad sitcom ending. Everything gets resolved into nice tidy way, and life proceeds as normal for the characters. Friday and today, many of my “issues” resolved themselves. Unlike a sitcom, this is not ending thankfully.

I finally got my schedule in order. Everything from classes to study periods all works out nicely. Not that I like the amount of bus based commuting I do. That hopefully will diminish after I look for carpooling rides. Now, if I can just follow my own schedule and due dates.

On the note of schedules, I finally made peace between my Palm and my desktop. Everything works at least in the Kontact-Palm interacti0ns. It took some time to bring back my emails, but everything now is in its proper place. My desktop neatly setup with few distractions (except the entire Internet and Half-Life 2) works for me now. Now I need to do work on it.

Most of projects are started and well on their way. The power of an enthusiastic group is awe inspiring. Things get done and quickly. Now if I need to do work.

The only things still in need of resolution are actual school work, my old work and minor things like exercising. Oh and I am still waiting for a coffee date.

Why Open Source Projects Make Sense Career Wise

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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

Delay/Hiatus… Sorry

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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.

Lurking in the Shadows…

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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.