Summer is here!

I guess it's been a while since I have wrote a post on my blog so I figured it would be a good time to recap my Spring!

Since I haven't been registered in classes this past term and the weather isn't so nice in Vancouver, I decided to travel to Asia for 3 months. I landed in Hong Kong just before Chinese New Year and I was a little surprised that it was quite cold in HK! Well, actually, it felt quite normal on the streets but without any heat at home, it was quite chilly especially when I'm sitting on the couch and not moving. It was super nice to see my Grandma, cousins and relatives as I haven't been back to HK in 12 years. The last time I was in HK, my two little cousins, Lok Tin and Lok Yee weren't even born! They are two, 6 and 7 years old kids that are super active in playing various activities. For example, we went for ice skating, basketball, flying kites and biking.

I made quite a few trips during my time in HK. In February, I made a week long trip to Taiwan where I visited TaiChung and Taipei. I met two Hong Kong exchange students in Mabel and Ah Do in TaiChung and went to visit Tunghai University and Feng Chia Night market together. Taiwan night markets are amazing, however, they were also the most unhealthy part of my Asia trip. The night market food usually consisted of eating some fried food and then drinking bubble tea afterwards. Holy calories! I headed back to Taipei afterwards and met Aaron whom I met back in our Backbone (BC Provincial Jr team - 2007 national champion team) days. He's been teaching English in South Korea for the last bit so I haven't seen him in a while! We went to most of the usuals such as the Taiwan National Museum, Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial, Sun Yat-sen memorial, Taipei 101, and National Palace Museum. The jaded cabbage was totally overrated in my opinion but I might have felt that way due to the fact that my feet were killing me after walking around that museum for 3+ hours... :) We also went to the outdoor hot spring in Xinbeitou and hot springs museum. I totally recommend hitting up the hot spring but do remember to stay hydrated! I went to Ximending to have dinner with the friends I've met in Tai Chung along with Debby (from Vancouver), Yung Yung (who could speak Korean, Cantonese, Russian and English!) and this other guy from Macau. We went strolling around Ximengding only to run into Aaron again when our group was trying to take stupid group selfie! :P Not much happened after that, I went to see the Taipei Zoo with Aaron for almost the entire day and saw the Canadian Women's hockey team win gold after a crazy comeback in the finals. I headed back to HK shortly after.

4 days after I came back to HK, I took off to Singapore this time. In hindsight, I felt that I should have taken a bigger gap in between because I was exhausted from Taiwan. I followed Aaron and bought the same flight to Singapore on Scoot airline and in hindsight, it was a stupid choice. The departure time was 630 am and so I ended up sleeping overnight at the HK international airport which really meant no sleep and I was freezing in the middle of the night. The flight itself was awesome on a really nice Boeing 777 and I landed 4 hours later. Having been frozen in Taiwan and HK for the past 10 days, Singapore was unsurprisingly hot! Like 30 degrees and I got sunburnt on my second day. I was scheduled to be staying in a hostel but my awesome high school friend, Cheryl picked me up and let me stay at her place! It was so nice to catch up with her after haven't seen her since 2007 and met her husband, Denis! It was totally the highlight of my time in Singapore. I'm not going to talk about too much about Singapore other than I did the usuals in seeing the Singapore Museum, Marina Bay, Sentosa Island (luge was so fun btw!) etc... My last night in Singapore, I went to this night market thing with Cheryl and Denis and got to try all these SE Asia type of food. It was super good! After that, I flew to Kuala Lumpur on a short 30 minute flight. I don't much to say about KL other than the fact that I didn't really enjoy my time there. I only stayed two days and I went to the usual stuff such as KLCC (I bumped into Aaron randomly with his friend Evan), Malaysia Musuem (nearly died having to cross 3 highways by foot), Chinatown etc... I headed back to Singapore for the night and had more Toast Box before flying back to HK.

Two weeks laters, I went on another trip. This time, it was to Boracay, Philippines to play beach ultimate at the Boracay Open. In total, there were about 40 people from the HKUPA (Hong Kong Ultimate Players Association) so it was insanely fun to have a bunch of friends escaping to a tropical beach. I'm only going to recap shortly because what happens in Boracay should really stay there. The tournament itself was really well organized and I had a great time playing against the Boracay dragons and other teams that have spent a lot of time playing on the beach. I was playing for one of the two HK pickup teams and while we started off strongly and nearly beat the Doracay Bragons and played well against the eventual champions, Boracay Dragons, we sucked in the middle of the tournament. Thankfully, we finished strong and played well to beat the Toronto Max Power team to end the tournament. I didn't realize they kept stats and somehow I won the top female defender award in the top division and won myself a pair of Haivianas. I also didn't realize they were having a post game ceremony and so I missed my 10 seconds of glory, haha. The beach parties were amazing and I really enjoyed the cheap mango shakes! Other fun (or stupid) things include sunset cruise (where Kat and Michael Ying won't stop splashing water at Felix and I), my inability to swim, eating crabs, the Spider Cove.

I made lots of small day trips in HK which include the peak, Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees, various museums but one of my absolute favourite parts of this HK trip was that I met a huge group of friendly people through the Hong Kong Ultimate Players Association (HKUPA). When I first arrived, I went to play pickup and then afterwards, there were club practices and league. I spent a lot of time practising and mentoring the club team Blaze and it was a very interesting experience working with various number of players. I have too many great memories of playing mahjong, flipping table arcade game, board games, eating out, decorating easter eggs etc... I definitely want to be back for more!

This post is getting insanely long, and perhaps I should put a stop here for now. I'm going to write more next time!

Finished School!

Woohoo! After 5.5 years, I have finally finished all my classes at UBC. This past term, I only took two classes in a Philosophy class about logic and an introduction class to Computer Security. It was an overall easy and relaxing term and ended up with a 90% average. Not a bad way to finish off! I have wait till May for covocation and then I'll be officially done with my undergrad. While my ugrad GPA is not extremely high, I'm proud of the fact that I did better and better each term after second year and ended up with the last 4 academic terms with straight A's. One thing I wished I knew earlier, at least before the start of my undergrad, is that GPAs don't bother all that much. I'm not saying to tank the grades but there wasn't a need to repeatedly stress over that midterm or final exam of having to do really well. The general idea of doing well in school is that it would lead to successful careers and to earn a solid salary. Quite honestly, having a good GPA does not lead to a better career in many cases (most of my employers have not seen my transcript) and heck, even getting a solid income does not lead to happiness. I find it amusing that many of my fellow friends almost live life to earn money in order to buy physical goods that will be rendered useless in a short period of time.

Enough of my rambling. I have been picking up Badminton in the past 2 months and it's been a fun experience. Why do I say that? I played a bit back when I was in high school but I was atrocious. I was bad not because I wasn't trying but it was due to the fact that I had no one to learn from and I wasn't going to improve without any proper coaching. On top of that, I didn't have proper shoes or anything better than a $20 racquet and I was literally going nowhere. I decided to focus on ultimate back then. However, now that I am quite free with lots of time and my sister has nicely let me use her Badminton equipment, I decided to enrol myself into Badminton lessons. I have only taken 8 classes and it has made an extreme difference. It's a fun sport but at the rate I'm going, I think I would peak soon by not finding enough competition unless I want to keep playing mixed doubles which I find quite uninteresting. This lead me to realize how awesome club ultimate is due to the fact that it's a team sport with a proper structured season and 'something' to actually compete for. Well, technically badminton has that too except you'll probably need to pay $30k and be extremely good.

What's next? I'm first heading to Hong Kong next week. It's been a good 12 years since I've been back and so I am very excited. I'll be back in April and I don't have too much planned then! :)

Mid Semester Check-in

This term has been flying by fast and quite honestly, there are so many events that have happened in the past bit. I decided to drop Functional Programming despite that it sounded like a super fun class with a super awesome prof. Unfortunately, when I checked my school credits, I was already 9 credits over the minimum 120 credits. I did not need Functional Programming for graduation so it was a $400 'fun' class that was a little too expensive in my opinion. I was already taking EECE 412 Introduction to Computer Security, a 4-credit $600 class for fun. I have been missing classes a lot lately because I have been making various trips out of town. Let me recap them.

3 weeks ago, I was at Club Regionals competing with Traffic to qualify for a spot to USA Ultimate Club Championships. The first day was perfect weather and our team played really well. However, the next day came with horrendous, Pacific Northwest rain and wind and my team did not perform up to our expectations. With a tough finals loss, we came 2nd to qualify as the 5th seed to the Club Championships. After that, I took off to Redmond/Bellevue area for my Microsoft full-time interview. If anyone of you has ever interviewed with Microsoft, you would know that they treat interviewees well. I stayed at Marriott Residence Inn in Redmond and the whole process was super well organized. I went to Seattle the next day to see my old colleagues from Amazon before heading to Bellevue Square Mall to look around. Didn't buy anything though. The next day I had my interviews and they went well. I ended up receiving a full-time offer from them for which I have still been deciding between Amazon and Microsoft's offers.

After coming back and staying for a week, the following week, I took off to the Grace Hopper Conference in Minneapolis. While there were about 15 students from UBC attending this conference and majority of us receiving funding from our department to go to the conference, we flew out of Seattle to help save some money for the trip. While saving $250 each was nice, we lost 1.5 days to travel which was more 'expensive' than I thought it was. I'm not sure if I would have went the same way if I had a second chance. Anyways, the conference was amazing. Minneapolis was a lot warmer than I have expected. It was super inspiring to meet various groups of technical women that have made great achievements through their own struggles. It was so great to see how hard work and perseverance can lead to great things. I met my Amazon (AWE) mentor, Marissa at the conference too! I got to meet and connect with various technical women that were so open to listening to my concerns and giving me quite advice. In terms of the talks, some of the technical and researched base talks were interesting but they weren't super in depth which was a little disappointing in my opinion but it was hard to cater for a large, diverse audience. I personally really enjoyed the talks on career development especially due to the fact that I have a slight glimpse of the industry from my internship experiences but have yet to face the full sets of challenges that a full-timer would see. There were lots of little things (ex: negotiation with your manager, how to grow your career, getting promotion, etc...) that I would never think about. I would really love to attend this conference in future years as a non-student.

The career fair seemed to be even bigger and better this year. Not only did I get invited to a handful of interviews, there were lots of excellent swag to get. I only went and got the ones that I really wanted because I thought it was wasteful to just grab everything that was free. I really liked the Google plastic folders, Red Hat wallet, Amazon AWE pull-up, $10 iTune, Dropbox tshirt! I ate too much popcorn during the conference too. I also answered a coding challenge from Amazon that gave me a Coding Ninja figure and a pink t-shirt that has yet to arrive. A Google recruiter approached me after the conference asking if I wanted to interview for a full time position. Honestly, I have two awesome full-time offers already that have deadlines in the upcoming week. I don't think I'll be able to make use of the opportunity this time around.

For this week back, I've been trying to get ahead with school work. My Computer Security group has decided to do a project on Binaural CAPTCHA as Human Interactive Proof on Massive Online Gaming. It's an interesting topic and perhaps something that may be useful! I'm going to be away all of this week to head to Frisco (near Dallas), Texas for the USA Ultimate Club Championships. I'm super stoked and excited for the competition. Time for me to get packing!

Almost End of Summer

Lots of things have happened since the last time I've blogged. Let me try to recap some of the highlights and my thoughts!

I have finished my 16 week internship at Amazon and have since moved back to Vancouver. Say hello to amazing asian food! I have missed it dearly since moving south of the border! :) I have also received notification that I will receive a full-time offer with Amazon. I am currently interviewing other big tech companies as well. I shall see in near future where I'll go to after graduation.

I'm a little sad to be leaving Seattle and I had lots of fun during my internship. You will not believe how much better I got at Ping Pong in the span of a summer. (Thanks Milo for pushing me better everyday!) I had some very awesome co-workers that are very positive and supportive of what I do. I gained lots of experience in developing on Ruby on Rails, general HTML/JS best practices and knowledge of Computer Security. Computer Security is such an interesting field and it was such a great opportunity to be around with co-workers that are so knowledgeable in this field. They taught me a lot.

I'm almost done reading the "Web Application Hacker's Handbook" (2nd edition) and I have to say that I am very impressed with that book! Totally worth every penny I've spent on it. It taught me so much about web application security flaws and how hard it is to keep a web application secure. I've also read "The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing" and it mentions about the Backtrack Linux Distribution that contains a whole lot of hacking tools. I'm really excited to try that out. I'll report back next time about it. On a side note, now that I'm getting more experience in this field, I have started noticing issues with really vulnerable web application. For example, the other day, I reported to the web admin of a PHP web application that his app contained some serious security flaws that included possible SQL injection, XSS, CSRF and improper session control!

On the ultimate side, lots of tournaments in the past month or so. I was in Toronto for 9 days to compete at the World u23 Ultimate Championships where my team placed 3rd. It wasn't quite what we were looking for but I am happy with the progress in what the team achieved. After a weekend off, I went to ECC to compete with Traffic. It was in Seattle this time so it was quite nice that I didn't have to travel out of town to play in a tournament! :D Just this past weekend, I moved home the night of my last internship to go back to Vancouver to compete in the Canadian Ultimate Championships that was held at UBC. Traffic swept through the competition to win the overall title. It was so much more exciting that my two friends, Yunduz and Byron, came out to watch despite that they have very little familiarity with the sport! That made my day! :D

What am I up to next? Two more weeks till school starts and I'm actually quite excited. It's always fun to go back to school after getting more industry experience because you learn so much while working in the industry. I find programming assignments getting easier per passing term. I'm looking to take Philosophy 220 (Intro to Logic), Functional Programming and Intro to Computer Security (EECE 412). This means I have lots of my time in my schedule and I haven't decided how to fill it out. I can fill it out by finding random employment but I'm not super in dire of money at the moment or go find a research lab that would want me or perhaps go spend some personal time in learning more technical stuff on my time. I feel like the third option sounds more fun! :)

Summer Time!

It's been almost half a year since I have updated this blog and too many things have happened since! To give you all a quick recap of my life, I completed 3 courses, Operating Systems (CPSC 313), Advanced Database (CPSC 404) and a EOSC elective course this past Spring term. Taking another OS course after the one I took in Birmingham University (where I went on exchange) was quite interesting. While the OS in Birmingham went through different subjects at extreme speed, the OS course at UBC went through much fewer topics but in much great depth. It was quite fun to code in C again. On top of that, when I took CPSC 213 which was the pre-req for CPSC 313, that the first time I've ever touched C in my life and I found the assignments in CPSC 213 to be quite difficult. 3 years later, with 20 months of industry experience through internships and a few more academic terms, I found the C assignments to be a complete breeze in CPSC 313. This was an example to not be discouraged when courses early in your major don't exactly go your way. I was much more prepared for the course this time around. Shortly after the exam period in April, I moved to Seattle, Washington for my internship at Amazon as a Software Development Engineer Intern. The move, for the most part, was quite smooth. I took the corporate housing option and now I am living by myself in an apartment in Ballard. It seems crazy to think that within the last 12 months, I have lived in three different countries! If there was any point in life to go and explore the world, it's definitely now. I have really made it a priority in the latter half of my undergrad major to explore as many opportunities as possible. Amazon has been a really interesting place to do an internship. I have never worked in such a big corporation before. During my previous co-op work terms, majority of the time, I felt I was placed in a role of more of a temporary full-timer. At Amazon, I felt that this has been a real internship where I gained useful mentorship at improving my technical and soft skills while doing meaningful work. It's also been awesome that Amazon places a strong emphasis on making sure that interns enjoy their time at Amazon to promote the company when they return back to their schools. Being such a big company, there are also many resources to learn from which include learning series lectures, various talks and internal company conferences. What have I been working on? I have been working on an internal Ruby on Rails web application tool that helps manages and organizes applications without going into too many details. Ruby on Rails hasn't been too hard to pick up because I have worked on Python and Django framework in the past. They are pretty similar. Something tells me that I haven't been exposed to the true greatness of Rails though. While I am on the Information Security team, I am not exactly working in Security based tasks. However, being on a security team, I have the luxurious opportunity to immerse myself into the field of security. It has been quite rewarding to learn so much about this field and the potential from various Security Engineers. I have been blessed with so much resources to learn from. This is where I learned that school teaches you nothing about security unfortunately. I am quite interested to pursue this field. On a side note, registration for Grace Hopper Conference is open! I highly recommend any female technical students to go! Perhaps I may meet you there? :)

Academic Differences That I've Noticed While Abroad

Now that 3 weeks of the academic term is already over, being back at UBC still seems unnatural to me. I wanted to write this blog post because yesterday, I found out one of my classmates in my CPSC 404 class is actually an exchange student. He mentioned that UBC seems to be difficult compared to his home institute. I thought I would write some thoughts about what I have noticed between the UK university education system (based on the University of Birmingham) vs the Canadian university education system (based on the University of British Columbia).

- Most UBC classes have 3 lecture hours a week and sometimes more with labs and tutorials. In Birmingham, most classes only have 2 lecture hours a week and sometimes labs and tutorials. I think the difference between 3 and 2 lecture hours makes a huge difference. The time table of a UK student is usually much less busier other than med school students.

- Birmingham students all live quite close to the university. All within walking distance. UBC is a total commute school and that is not existent in the UK. Not only do Birmingham students have way more time than UBC students, but they also look way more rested, less sleepy in class and less stressed out. The social events created by the Guild of Students are very well attended.

- No midterms in the UK. 80% finals! The finals are worth so much to lessen the possibility of students cheating on assignments. Without midterms, I see students less stressed out in trying to cramp study for midterms in the middle of the term.

- Birmingham students are extremely involved in sports. Almost everyone is playing a sport because most sports have 1st, 2nd and 3rd teams. Everyone that is keen for a sport, will almost have an opportunity to play. The University is also very supportive of club sports in providing facility unlike UBC.

- Computer Science assignments at Birmingham required less research on my own time but this can be highly bias because I only took 2 classes that had programming assignments. When I mean less research, they provided a lot of example code that turned the assignments into a lot of copying and pasting and tweaking to work.

- Tuitions were similar for domestic students of both Canada/UK before England removed the tuition cap. Previously, it was 3000 pounds per year and it is now a whooping 9000 pounds.

- Degrees in England are only 3 years in length where as Canada is 4. However in England, you declare your major when you enter into the university and stay in that program. Switching between programs is hard and so when students need or want to switch, they will drop out of the university. This is huge difference in my opinion. Because of the 3 years in length, students take almost no electives outside of their major and students do not study in quite as much breadth as a UBC CS student. For example, the Operating Systems in C/C++ (an excellent class IMO) is an elective for a third year student and students can graduate without learning C or C++. (Shocking!)

- Students need to graduate in 3 years. I don't know exactly what happens if you don't graduate in time by failing a class. Students at UBC can take up to 7 years to do their undergrad degree and take terms off as they wish.

- UBC CS students seem way more prepared for the industry upon graduation than the students in Birmingham. Most UBC CS students do co-op or at least some internships on their own. Birmingham doesn't have a co-op program but students can take a gap year to work a year in the industry. Not that many students are in that program though.

- All exams in first and second term are in April/May at Birmingham. This means massive cramming in April to study for all classes. Classes were out by the first week of December and so there is almost a month break for Christmas. They take Christmas very seriously there!

All in all, I find Birmingham students way more relaxed, unstressed and more so enjoying their university career than UBC students. Without the massive commute, less classes and lighter homework load, I enjoy my university life way more in Birmingham than I did 4 years at UBC. However, I feel that I definitely learn more at UBC!

Back Home

Now that I am sitting back in rainy Vancouver, I thought I would give another update of a post. My term ended on the first week of December and I had exams right after the regular term was over. This is unusual for UK students because they have all the exams in May (including first and second term) so my professors made specific exams for me. The exams went well in general but I didn't spend as much time as I would have wanted to study. The last week was all about having farewell parties (my last hurrah!) and saying good bye to my good friends. Let me recap what happened over the past month or so.

On Nov 7, I had the amazing opportunity to go to Google's London office for a celebration in womens in computing event called Google CodeF. I got invited through an application process done online and the top 50 applicants were selected to attend! It was a day filled with talks, group activities to a slight programming challenged,  grilling a googler with questions and some drinks toward the end of the night. I had my taste of what the Google lunch was and it was delicious! I felt the event was more guided towards showing why students should apply to Google and I slightly wish it was more towards the technical aspects and challenges of Google. I would have been very interested in learning more in that aspect. Oh well, all in all a good day in meeting lots of really great female computer scientist. The programming challenge was challenging in the short time span but wasn't hard. The challenge was to create a website that intakes a input form to search for users with the Google+ API and display the results by using JavaScript to manipulate the HTML elements on the webpage. That was the basic part but there were 3 extra challenges that were to display results instantly without having to press enter, have pagination (the Google+ API didn't really support this and had to use ways to hack around it), and to use Google Map API to display a map with where the users are from. Strangely, only one other group (we were randomly assigned in groups of 2) managed to finish the first challenge and my group got through all 3! :) It wasn't quite bug free as I wanted and the code was really messy. But that's the problem when you're under time constraint (under 2 hours) and it was either messy code or less features.

Last post I mentioned that the womens ultimate team at Birmingham won regionals and it was the first regional win in club history. Adding to that, I was playing on the mixed team two weekends after and the team managed to bag another regionals victory! It has been a breakout year for the club! I was pretty happy with how the team responded with a pool-play loss and only to win the finals against the same team uBu has lost to earlier. The team also faced some slight adversity at the start by going down early but found a way to will the win. The womens team also attended nationals in Cardiff, Wales and finished 5th which was the highest finishing for an England team. First time in club history for a womens team to attend indoor nationals. I can not say how proud I was of the team to bring the same type of intensity and grit throughout the tournament and always wanting to win. On top of that, everyone believed that the team could win. I totally believed the team was good enough to take the crown that day but it didn't fall in our favour that day unfortunately. I'm still so proud to have the opportunity to be part of uBu even if it was a very short time. Thank you!

On some more exciting news, I have been selected on to the Canadian U23 Womens Ultimate national team and I will be competing in the Worlds u23 Ultimate Championships in July this upcoming summer!  I'm really excited and hope to perform well at the tournament. Lots of hard work to do starting now and gotta love working out. :)

After I was done with exams and saying good bye to my awesome British friends, I took off to Paris for a few days before taking the train to Belgium. I took the EuroStar (oh, wallet destroyer) for the first time and I have to say it was really cool to be in two very different places with a simple 1.5 hours train ride. Paris is an actual really pretty city to go to but oh boy, it was really sketchy. There were scammers everywhere and I felt my pockets were under target at all times. I met some really nice people from Argentina (Martin, thanks for the gloves), New Zealand, Australia and Finland. I then learned from Martin that Argentina does not import Kit-Kats. He filled 1/4 of his suitcase with Kit-Kats! I did most of the usual Paris attractions such as Louve, Les Catacombes, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Trioumph etc... I saw a few more Christmas Markets (I saw 9 in total in about 7 days) and found poutine! It wasn't done correctly. :P

I went to Belgium to meet up with my cousin, Jess, whom I have not seen since I was 5. I wouldn't even believe that one day I would take off on my own to go on this long journey and seeing her. I cannot thank her enough for the awesome hospitality! I finally got to meet Davis and Kris! Davis is the cutest 2 year old ever and always has lots of energy. I got to see Bruges and Antwerpen and I highly recommend those cities. Really really beautiful! I never saw trains the same after seeing how much Davis adores them. I'm very sad to have to leave Belgium but I hope they come visit in Canada sometime soon!