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!