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Chellew.info Blog

Saturday, 21 June 2008 16:29

My placement year is drawing to a close. As a part of my final tutor visit, I've been asked to think about think about my achievements over the year.

Knowledge and Skills

Business

I've learned a lot about business. The good and the bad, there is certainly some bad.

A few of my least favourite business phrases:
"Take things forward" - Relating to a project or product basically translates to do nothing useful in the future.
"Touch base offline" - Normally heard in a telecon or team meeting when something can be dealt with one to one.

Programming

Object oriented programming - Abstraction, Encapsulation, Polymorphism, Inheritance, I now understand these princples far greater than I did before.

Design Patterns - Something clearly missed off every module, or course I've previously done but a hugely important princple that I'm glad to be at least aware of the 40 odd patterns that exist.

Java - Having worked on a real project I have much more confidence in my own ability, the largest project I worked on before was the 40 class, second year project. This year I've worked on one comprising of 3000-5000 classes. I also now have an understanding of Generics which along with Design Patterns will certainly make my final year project better.

C# despite a Microsoft Technology its a nice thing to add to my CV, it was similar enough to Java.

Personal

Escape

In order to forfil my objective for a good job in I.T. I've always known I'd have to get away from Cornwall. My placement year and finding a job in the South East gave me this opportunity.

I took a gamble on my accomodation, using the very helpful FlatmateClick.co.uk I found a house in Fleet. Despite having seen no more than 6 photos of the house and never met the landlord or other housemate I paid the first months rent and moved up here.

I know have a new base here in Fleet, with many new people I have met. Many people I will miss when I leave but I hope to be back soon.

Flying

Before this year I'd never been on an aeroplane or outside of the UK. Which to many people came as a bit of a shock.
I got the opportunity to go to the U.S. whilst working on a project before Christmas. We went to Valley Forge, PA. As the whole flying experience was completely new to me I wasn't sure how I was going to cope with my first flight gladly I experienced no air sickness or nerves really at all. The whole trip was great, if a little cold with snow most days we were out in the States.

Placement progress

Wednesday, 19 December 2007 00:00

Its nearly time for my 24 week report so I’ve been at Lockheed for nearly 6 months now.

I’ve spent the last 3 months working with the Architecture team on a pilot project for the MoD, in this I have learnt how to code in C#, interface with Salamander’s MooD API, had a weeks trip to Valley Forge, USA.

What have I learnt about software development?

Requirements are useful
I coded the majority of the software, I have seen no actual requirements for the software, no actual design. The application became the design and the design frequently got changed with lead to me doing the same thing multiple times, therefore I can see the value in Requirements capture, and adding penalties for the customer changing requirements.

Documentation is useful
The majority of the coding I did to interact with the MooD database was without any API documentation, and unlike all products I have worked with before there are no code samples online. I finally got the 2007 documentation about a month ago which was nice as I could finally see how to access objects rather than guessing all the time.

What have I learnt about the US?

Don’t try sarcasm
It doesn’t appear to work the other side of the Atlantic.

Don’t go there if trying to lose weight or have a small apetite
The portions are about 3x what you’d expect even a salad can arrive on a plate the size of the table.

Stage 2 over

Sunday, 27 May 2007 00:00

The year is finally over, its not been easy but I have survived.
Term 1 was difficult, with a lot more work that the first year although to quote Fred our stage tutor Term 2 would be easier.

It wasn’t, Term 2 and most importantly the Integrating Project took alot of work espically towards the end of the term for me once I was fully committed to creating the final product.
The 4 exams in term 3 went much more smoothly, I feel they went well on the whole, and I might have actually picked up my bad coursework marks in AI with the exam.
I hope I maintained the high grade achieved in Stage 1, but will see in July when the results are out, For now I’ve got 6 weeks holiday before I start my placement. Just need to find somewhere to live in Farnborough.

It’s kittens for you!

Wednesday, 16 May 2007 00:00

Its that time again when I post what everyone in the house owes me for paying for the internet/tv/phone services, and as usual no one bats an eyelid. So like last time I have to ensure I get paid back before everyone goes home, I’m not good at threats but my latest is that they have 7 days to pay up else it’s kittens for them, yes kittens…

Being exam time I guess I should revise but when I’m bored I tend to break things this being no exception.
My latest adventure into the world of linux, was to see if I could get back at a certain housemate (evaD) for putting my laptop on dodgy web sites, using my little Linux know how and the new OpenWRT firmware I put on our Linksys WRT54G router I set about finding how.

I figured the firewall would be a good place to start and searched for iptables guides. My first go at adding a firewall rule to the router went completely wrong, not only was one computer being redirected, all where including SSH requests so I couldn’t get back into the router to disable the rule.

Basically I then had to “unbrick” our router for the tenth time, after the process was complete of course I was then a bit bored again so I figured out how to use Iptables properly without just trying a command which I didn’t understand. After a few hours I was successfully able to redirect specific machines and specific addresses to other web sites, not bad for a linux newbie.