[V]andemar.org

Yesterday was the SWE job fair, and although this year the number of companies attending that I cared about was rather low, I still managed to put on the old suit and tie and drop by and hand out my resume. The first stop I made was the Microsoft booth (don’t judge). They asked me a couple of fairly easy logic questions, and we talked for a while about projects I did in the past, and projects I’m currently involved in. I’m not so sure they were happy when I elaborated on the elegance, simplicity, and stability of my embedded linux encrypted hard drive solution, as well as my constant drive to write highly portable code.

Still however, the representatives were intelligent, well-spoken, and the jobs available were both interesting and paid well. If I do in fact get an interview and a posh job offer, I may very well end up selling my mortal soul and working for Microsoft (stop crying Kurt). Oh, yeah, they also gave me a free shirt! Free stuff is always good, even if it comes from Bill Gates.

The Motorola booth was also enjoyable, and they really loved the fact I had received the Motorola Undergraduate Research Grant (big surprise). One of the engineers there was working with C on embedded devices, which is almost exactly what I want to do. I’m definitely hoping for an interview.

Although I didn’t plan to visit any other companies, as I was walking around looking at the other booths I was pulled aside by a girl around my age who had a booth in a corner, facing the wall. She was a software engineer at a company called “Wolverine Trading”. Evidently they run a large variety of stock bots that manage to earn a lot of money. I talked to her for a bit about my programming experience, then elaborated on my own little Python+FANN based attempt to predict stock trends. They’re doing similar things, except actually putting them into full use with millions of dollars. I just recieved an email from them desiring a phone interview (to London), so I guess she was reasonably impressed. The job actually sounds quite exciting, but when she mentioned they were in the process of updating a lot of their old Visual Basic code, alarm bells went off. I’d love to work on a production stock bot, but there’s no way I’m going to port Visual Basic code to C++. Maybe I can convince them to use Python… If I do take the job, I’d probably end up working in London, which would mean I could ride around on those double decker busses, which counts for mega bonus points in the final decision. I mean seriously, who wouldn’t want to ride to work in a vehicle like this:

All in all, everything went extremely well, and I’m guessing all three will result in an interview. Seems I might be employable after all…

On a random server note: I had to reboot after only 10 days of uptime, since some sort of memory leak took up a massive amount of memory (I’m guessing and hoping that it was Beagle that caused it since if not, Suse 10.0 needs serious fixing). Also, I’m up to 7,930 SSH login attempts. To any bots out there: My login name wasn’t ‘test’ or ‘guest’ the first time, and it’s not going to be after the 10,000th time either so STOP!

~ by Andrew on October 21, 2005.