Life Nowadays

Rather than just put up a notice that I didn’t know what to blog so there’s no blog for this week, I decided to post a little personal blurb about how I’m doing nowadays.

My first week or two of my internship this summer started off with full energy and excitement. As I settled down during the third or fourth week, this energy was hard to maintain and I started needing to take coffee to be fully alert in the morning. Having a long bucket list of what to do over summer in addition to wanting to relax after a long hard day of work really skews the sleeping hours. Writing this blog so late at night, for example, after watching a movie with my roommate and watching Face Off before that and going to the gym even before that- really cuts into my sleeping hours. As the days go by, when I once arrived at work 7:30am each morning, I end up arriving at 8am instead.

That being said, I have found out how an alert mind can change my day completely. Days when I’m fully rested end up being far more productive than days when I cut off a few hours of sleep to enjoy reading a manga or browse the web. Additionally, I find my mood towards things completely change- on the days I’m rested, I find finding bugs in developer’s code to be something new and mind-stimulating- on the days where I’m lacking sleep, I find new bugs bothersome and end up getting annoyed with the developers who were in charge of writing the buggy code.

How do I combat the built-up negative emotions accumulated? Exercise seems to be the key. I started exercising to be healthy about two years ago- however, what made me exercise as a daily routine was my desire to cosplay a character who wore a tight outfit. Now, I continue it because I like how my body and mind feels during and after a workout. Today, especially, exercise was important for combatting stress and pressure from work due to an addition of new responsibilities.

Speaking of new responsibilities, my school starts on the 26^th. I look forward to what I will learn from school, but at the same time, I am not looking forward to being saddled with further responsibilities and being stripped of the ability to just relax after work. Instead, I would have to get accustomed to working on studies and assignments after work.

Despite all that may seem gloomy from my discussion, I am loving life and finding enjoyment amongst the stress at work. Hopefully, I will be able to come up with a new and interesting blog post about some topic I find intriguing soon.

Burning Fat with Bishonen and Fan Remixes of Anime Songs

Today, I will be discussing anime/game subjects that I have found in Crunchyroll.

An article over here: “VIDEO: Burn Fat With Bishonen! Otome Version of Otaku Fitness App Previewed” presents a new fitness game targeted towards girls called Nensho for Girls. From the preview, it seems to incorporate a dating simulation feature that provides extra motivation for wanting to exercise- I am assuming that the more regularly you exercise, the better your relationship gets with the guy in the game. As a girl who has an interest in males, I find this to be a fun and unique way to motivate a person to exercise. I wonder if there exists a similar game targeted towards straight males?

The article, “Fan Creates Orchestral Version of “Free!” Ending”
brings up an interesting remix to this ending here:

Personally, I find it amazing how fans showcase their talents for their love of anime series. One particular show I possibly may do a fan work for myself is Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin). I find the soundtrack to be very emotionally moving and would like to perhaps do a violin cover of one of the songs one day. Here’s an incredible piano duet done by two fans for the series:

I’m not sure if I should separate my blog into separate blogs, considering how my interests greatly vary. I indulge in programming, arts and crafts, anime, music (both playing and listening), gaming, television/YouTube series watching, and cooking. I hope to make the blog accessible to those who are not experienced and/or knowledgeable in any of these areas and feel that keeping a common area for all my interests will allow me to update more frequently and regularly. I hope my method of doing this will still make my blog enjoyable to read.

I wish all my readers a good week! See you next week ^__^

Career tips and advice for upcoming job-hunters

Honestly, I may not be the most experienced or seasoned job-hunter, but I learned a quite a few things when I was out and looking for an internship. Looking ahead, I will most likely be out and about looking for jobs again this fall. Seeing that others may be in the same position as me, I decided to do my blog today to help those who may encounter the same bumps and struggles as I did last year.

Things to keep in mind while job-hunting:
1. Be ready to job-hunt BEFORE you need to job-hunt.

I fell on my butt last year because I was not seriously looking for a summer internship a year before I needed an internship. Thinking that I had a full year ahead of me to get an internship for the summer, I did not take my school’s fall career fair very seriously. This was a fatal mistake. Unbeknownst to me, some companies start and end their recruiting for internships during the fall. When I finally was “ready” to apply for internships, many internship positions were actually closed, even though publicly, on their website, they were shown as open.

In addition, even if you do get a premature opportunity opened up to you, being ready for these positions is essential. Which brings me to the next point.

2. Find out what companies need and want from their job listings, and make sure you have those skills.

If you know what type of job you want to go for, look for job listings that match that, and see if you are qualified. If not, make sure you have those skills. I personally need to build up my C/C++ knowledge to the high demand of that knowledge in the software development field. And even if you think you have the skills, find some sample interview questions testing those skills, and make sure you know how to answer them. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, it’s still a good idea to look around to see what’s out there and get a gauge for what’s available to you.

3. Network and keep updated.

This is an essential part of job-hunting: for some fields, it may not be necessary to finding a job, but it definitely facilitates the process of finding opportunities and getting your foot in the door. First off, if you do not have a single person in your network (which may just be your fellow classmates in the same program as you)- look for opportunities to connect. This may be through school clubs and organizations- I follow my school’s Women in Computer Science (WICS) Facebook page so that I can have access to all of their events and news, although I am not officially part of their roster. This alone allows me to pick up information about upcoming company recruiting sessions and technical conferences. IBM happened to set up a booth at one of the conferences I went to, and I landed my current internship position. Additionally, I received information about the WICS page from a classmate who was a board member of the club- again, a demonstration of how having a network and staying connected is very important.

4. Know what you want to do.

This bit of advice coincides with a bit of what I’ve said about tip #2. First, figure out what jobs are out there- it doesn’t do much good to want to go for a job that isn’t existing anymore- and find out what you want to do. Take note that you do not have to classify the specific details of what you want to do, but at least knowing a broad qualification of what you want to do with your career and why you want to do it is very important. I have only had a few interviews so far, but in every single interview I have taken, the interviewers always ask me where I see myself in the next five years and what I see myself doing. For my current internship, I bluntly told the interviewers that I did not want to stay in software testing as a career, and that I wanted to do software development in the future. However, I also told them that despite this, I saw how having software testing experience would be useful for any future software development I go into. Especially when it could contribute to writing less buggy code with higher quality and usability.

Again, I am not a veteran job-hunter or human resource employee, but I hope that what I have learned from my personal job-hunting experience will help others with their job-hunting. Best of luck!

An Intro to Version Control

As job-hunting season comes closer, I find it important to brush up on skills I would need for getting my foot in the door and succeeding at interviews. One of the skills I go over today is something incredibly useful, and can be applicable towards many different things, although generally it is more heavily and catered towards group programming projects.

Version control is a tool that keeps track of many different versions of a group of files. The tool is almost like a time machine- if you mess up one of your files you can go back in time and find a time where the file is not messed up and change it back to that version. For this reason, it is helpful to sometimes keep track of your own files with version control, so you do not have to worry as much about accidentally deleting a file that you needed. However, the main usage of version control is through group projects.

Have you ever tried to work on a project together with other people and found that each and every single time someone updated something, they would have to either put it in an electronic dropbox or save spot online (or email every group member the new copy) and each person without the newest copy would have to redownload the file? Version control eliminates this process. It designates a shared spot for the project called a repository. This repository is put on a server and released onto the Internet, where each group member can access it. The project then can be downloaded from the Internet into a designated location on someone’s computer used specifically for this project. This usually can be anywhere on the computer, as long as the person lets the version control tool know that this location is where the project is supposed to be located. Now, whenever someone updates the project, this person can tell the tool that they want to update the shared copy on the server to match their personal copy, and upload the changes.  Depending on the tool, the tool may inform everyone else who has the project that someone has made changes to the shared copy and that they may want to update their personal copy. Alternatively, the tool may wait till a person asks to update their personal copy, and then inform them of the changes made. Either way, each change creates a new version of the project, and each version is saved in the repository. So if someone makes a faulty update to the shared copy, the group members can undo this by reverting the shared copy to a previous version of the project.

There are many other fancy cool things you can do with version control, such as reversing changes for only certain files in the project or labeling each version with a comment on what was changed or updated. But some of these things can vary based on which version control tool you use. Most version control tools that are free to use also are highly public. In other words, if you do not want your project to be available to the rest of the Internet, these free tools may not be a good thing to use. The two free version control tools I know about are GitHub and Google Code. Not many version control tools are free because maintaining a server for the shared space on the Internet that groups use costs money- not charging a fee would usually result in a loss of money. For personal usage, where a server is not required and when one would only want to use version control to keep different versions of their files, the tools are usually free- the ones I know of are Subversion, Git, and Perforce. The version control systems I have used for work (where costs are covered by the company) are TortoiseSVN, Team Foundation Server, and Rational ClearCase.

I leave it up to the reader to decide which version control tool is better and if it is even worth the trouble to learn the mechanisms of the tool to keep their project in version control. And in many cases, even if one member wants to use version control, it is difficult to have all members try to learn the tool. However, the time saved trying to download different project items all the time, as well as the reduced risk of corrupting the project without a previous version to fall back on often makes version control essential for every job that is related to programming. Which is why it is often attractive for a person applying for a programming-related position to have prior version control knowledge. I highly encourage any aspiring computer programmers/testers/developers/engineers to learn how to use this tool. For all others, I hope that this tool may come in handy- it may be interesting to see how the tool keeps different versions of an image file or movie file. 😉

Here are some links to version control tools, for those who are interested:

Perforce http://www.perforce.com/

Git http://git-scm.com/

Subversion http://subversion.apache.org/

Tortoise SVN http://tortoisesvn.net/

GitHub https://github.com/

ClearCase http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/clearcase/

Team Foundation Server http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ff637362.aspx