[V]andemar.org

Today was the day to end all days. I woke up, showered, and immediately put on my suit and headed over to the interview center, where I had an interview with SWRI scheduled. The interview went reasonably well, considering that I was preoccupied by my English exam directly afterwards. SWRI is based out of Texas, and does a lot of contracting work (about 60% government and 40% private). They obviously are really interested in new engineering blood, as they offered to match any other job offers I got (within reason). Directly after my interview I headed over and took my English midterm. Although my essay wasn’t exactly … coherent, I’m hoping it’ll at least fall amidst the rest of the class’s answers in quality…

I spent most of the rest of the day thinking about/working on my CS339 databases project in the FoMo Tomorrow Lab, and I’ve come to a couple of conclusions:

• Python is great.
• Designing an efficient, complete, and extensible data model for an application is HARD!
• FoMo has awesome labs in the sub-basement. A room full of computers with Ubuntu installed, a fridge chock full of caffeine infused liquid, and a nerf gun. What more could you ask for? (no Dan, you can’t have any sexbots)
• Starting to actually implement a really neat idea for a highly dynamic, social, and complex website is a lot of fun!
• Myghty (the python equivalent of HTML::Mason) is exceptionally powerful, well designed, and has a very bright future ahead of it (in our project especially).

To give you an idea of the complexity of the data model for just our simple prototype, here’s a PNG of the E/R diagram (click for a full sized version):

Although there’s much more that I’d like to elaborate on about the project, upcoming interviews, and various other events, I’m going to have to cut this post short so I can finally get a little bit of sleep. Hopefully when I get a bit more free time I can write a decent synopsis of the two projects I’m involved in, and the prominent use of Python in both of them.

~ by Andrew on October 26, 2005.