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The game I've been working on all semester, SAND, is "done" (in the sense that Gamesfest is tomorrow, not in the sense that we're even remotely finished with it). I made a quick trailer for it which is a little bit bizarre because it only shows off 1v1 multiplayer, while the game doesn't work at all without 3v3. Still, it gives a pretty good idea about what the game looks like, if not how it plays.
If you're using Safari, it should show up below, otherwise view it at YouTube. Crank up the volume (you have to hear Pete's awesome music!) and quality and give it a watch.
This Thursday will mark four years since our little group of CHS kids returned from the Bahamian "Big Yard". This year's trip just got back, and it reminded me that I still hadn't done anything with the journal-book-thing I'd been compiling so many years ago. Since it's clear now I won't be printing it, I figured I'd just post the PDF here!
So, here it is! I don't know what kind of sillyness lies within, as it's been years since I've read it, but enough work went into it that it's worth keeping somewhere!
A year and a half ago, I wrote a little bit about RCOS, mostly explaining what it is and why it's so important in the context of RPI. Recently, though, I've had the opportunity to experience another of the virtues of RCOS; one which the faculty will never see, and which the younger students can only dream of.
The first two months of this year were spent frantically submitting job applications via all possible means, responding to multitudes of emails, fielding phone screens from quite a few companies, and finally ending in on-sites. The majority of this went exactly as you or I would expect; however, looking back over all of these conversations, I noticed an interesting pattern:
They don't care about school.
Sure, they wanted someone with a Bachelor's. But to all of them, that part seemed to be entirely uninteresting. Besides brief, passing references ("What was your favorite class?"), there was nearly no discussion of formal education. I could likely have had an English degree and they wouldn't have cared; my answer to "What was your favorite class?" was often something in ARTS or COMM, and that didn't even begin to phase them. Grades didn't even come into the picture.
What did we talk about? We talked about Notebook, we talked about Seed, we talked about the code that runs this site, we talked about all of the random stuff on my GitHub. We even talked about RCOS explicitly, because they like to hire people who do things.
The thought of a single place to go to find people who actively participate in software projects outside of what is required to graduate, and to have the added benefit of being able to instantly investigate their code had some of these engineers and hiring managers salivating. I had one manager ask me about explicit internal details of one of my projects — things he couldn't have known had he not looked at the code, and things that would have been impossible for him to know had said code not been open-source.
The takeaway from this is simple, and bipartite:
- The work you do in RCOS can help you get a job. If there's code, and it's great, you're already better than almost every other candidate, regardless of school, major, or grades.
- The work you do in RCOS should be of quality representative of yourself, because employers will look at it. In addition, there better actually be code to look at, or you're simply forfeiting this opportunity.
Good news, everyone! Matt will be attending RPI's Physics Ph.D. program, starting in the fall!
In my last post, I mentioned my inability to write code on the iPad.
I've fixed this. Sort of.
Quite the abomination.
A few weeks ago, my MacBook Pro started kernel panicing constantly, just minutes after boot. Being quite familiar with similar issues in previous machines, I reinstalled OS X, to no effect. Took it to the Apple Store, "it's caused by some USB device, here, have it back". Left it with no devices plugged in, same story. I'm not sure why I was unable to duplicate the problem in the Store; though, at the time, the issue would sometimes disappear for a day at a time.
I bought an iPad the day I retrieved my laptop; I wasn't planning on going on a trip without a computer of some sort, and I had spent some time with Peter's first-gen, which was awesome as well. I've been challenging myself to find a way to do most of the things (everything besides writing code) that I do on a regular computer on the iPad; I'm even writing this post on it! (that's more of a challenge for me than you dynamic-blog people know)
It's been great.
But I can't write code. I haven't gotten to work on Notebook since Xcode 4 launched; I hear it has awesome multi-project support that will make things a lot easier. I've been working on my game for EGD, because I have lots of extra PCs around, but it's uncomfortable and I don't have a way to show things off in class, which is super annoying.
I'm going to take my machine back at some point; I have a lot more logs now, and a lot of debugging that I've done that I can't share with them (I physically disconnected all of the internal USB devices one at a time, but they don't want to hear that — also, it had no effect; I also disabled USB by deleting the drivers, but that didn't help any either (it seemed to, briefly, but then I was once again presented with that wonderful multilingual dialog)).
Hopefully they'll fix it; I miss Cocoa and Exposé and TextMate and Aperture (I have hundreds of pictures from our trip that I can't edit and upload)! Hopefully quickly, so I have a machine to show off stuff in EGD with. VNC to Jayne on the iPad is not an effective demonstration device, what with the 10+ second lag. Thanks, TimeWarner.
I found a few potential apartments in Cupertino; I'll save that for a post once I have a functional way to upload pictures.
So, if anyone's wondering why I don't get back to you as quickly as usual, or you note that I'm short on words in my replies, it's likely because I'm tapping on glass instead of plastic keys.
It's been quite a while since I've written here! While I'm only taking 12 credits this semester, it seems like one of the busier semesters I've had, at least so far... random assorted notes, in no particular order:
- I got a job! I'll be joining Apple's WebKit team in June. I'm extremely excited; however, in order to keep this website separate from work, this is the first and last time I'll mention this fact.
- I'm visiting Silicon Valley during spring break to find an apartment, along with Mom!
- Carol got a job! She'll be hanging out in Rochester, at Harris Corporation!
- I dropped Cryptography/Network Security, because it was unnecessary and was threatening to be the class that I ignore this semester in favor of the more demanding ones.
- Notebook has a few new features: indent/unindent region, and a reasonable API for providing access to an engine's globals. Progress is much slower than it was over winter break, because I have to spend so much time on other things...
- There are videos on YouTube of my first and second Experimental Game Design games.
- I'm spending a lot of time on Experimental Game Design; this always seems to happen with Arts/Communications classes when I take them! This time around, it's because I've committed to being the sole programmer on a really complicated multiplayer game, which puts me a bit out of my element. But I'm making the most of it (even if that involves spending a lot of time on MSDN...)
- If EGD takes a lot of time, IT & Society takes up just as much — there's constantly writing, editing, formatting, or meetings.
- Amy and I are going to see Donald Glover (Community's Troy Barnes) do standup and stuff at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC (the same place Carol and I went to see She & Him a while back!)
- We're (probably) relicensing Seed under LGPLv2+ so that webkit-gtk can use parts of it. What kind of coincidence is that??
In the theme of Mom and Vivian's posts with pictures of their lovely piles of snow, here's mine:
J. Erik Jonsson (that is a statue of him, right, guys? I can't tell because the sign is covered up) with a lapful of snow.
The Academy Hall parking lot, after I made what was hopefully my last visit ever to the registrar.
There are only a few hours until the end of 2010 — 2011 is almost here!
Instead of writing something about the year or the decade, I'll leave you with Charlie Stross' thoughts. A bunch of the comments are good too.
Here's to yet another year!
P.S. I promise there will be long posts soon... it's been a while!
We're going to Nassau for Christmas; I'm taking my camera, SICP, (my first time through it, as one of my vacation projects) and not much else. Don't expect to hear from me for a few days, in any case!
Everybody have an awesome Christmas/New Year's... I'm sure we all will!
On to 2011!
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