I got a jawb!

I'm going to be a graduate developer at realestate.com.au!!! So as of early next year, I'll be rotating throughout the company working on various projects in loads of different technologies.

REA put a lot of effort to making the recruitment process as enjoyable as possible. I was flown to Melbourne to do the interview and I came back with just as much knowledge about working in IT and REA as the information they gathered about me.

It's a complete miracle that I've managed to acquire this position. This was the only graduate position I actually applied for, as:

• I didn't think I could graduate for another year or so
• BUT this job sounded so perfect that I devised a strategy - (most likely) fail to get the position this year, then apply next year with a perfect application off what I had learned

When the offer got serious, I found out that it is possible to graduate with just my IT degree at the end of the year, so I'll be dropping my business degree to continue in the future for whenever I actually develop an interest in it.

So I'll be moving down to Melbourne for the position with my kitty cat early next year ^^

Look how excited she was when I told her.

In light of these events, I'm going to start a series on this blog about my overall honest reflections on university - what I completely despised and what I thoroughly enjoyed. Additionally, the nature of my posts will be changing in nature. I'll be focusing more on analytical content rather than observational content. It will be much more interesting to (all 2 of my) readers and give this blog a purpose.

Get hype.

Rails Girls~

Ruby on Rails is an awesome web framework, similar to Django, which I talked about a few weeks ago. I went to Rails Girls on the weekend, which allocates a day to go through in quite a bit of depth, all technologies involved in creating a website with Ruby on Rails.

These were:

• Installation
• HTML/CSS
• Ruby
• Combining them together with Rails
• Github
• Deploying to Heroku with PostgreSQL

It was super fun. It seems that the Ruby community is super strong in Brisbane. It's perfect for anyone who knows nothing about creating a website, not just Ruby on Rails.

Tutorial: http://guides.railsgirls.com/app/

Here's my deployed website: http://morning-ocean-7579.herokuapp.com/ideas

I'd love to use Django or Rails for my website, however since the most complex thing I do is list my blog posts (which can even be done on the client) it seems a little over the top, especially since I'd need to pay for cloud hosting which is vastly more expensive than my cheap web hosting.

:s

Berp Borp

I went to Intro to Electronics at The Edge tonight! It's a two hour workshop that introduces you to basic electronics concepts and fabrication - sewing with electronics.

We made badges :3 With two tiny LEDs powered by a coin cell battery, joined together with conductive thread.

It's name is Berp Borp.

We beat the game!!

Fix My City won Best Use of Transportation Data!!!

Isn't Rameelcajo pretty when we're not working our butts off!?

Getting warm and fuzzy with Pia Waugh, who's passion for open data is so potent, Caleb couldn't hold my phone properly, and Adam Spencer... who's on Catalyst and everything science related.

\(^w^)/ The True King of Westeros \(^w^)/

PyCon Australia!

I went to PyCon on the weekend! It's a Python - a programming language - conference set here in Brisbane. I volunteered and was placed in the main theatre to do audio/visual work in effort to obtain a free ticket, avoid awkward lonely moments and satisfy my slowly developing altruism.

The view from my station overlooking the main theatre~

The presentations covered many topics from the issues of supporting multiple versions of Python, how to ask questions effectively online, why catering for accessibility will improve your website and what I can only describe as Python bashing. There were loads of technical talks that just went over my head.

Previously, I've used Python a lot for my Project Euler questions mainly because of its support for integer overflow and its handy math libraries. Other than that, I've also just completed an internship in Django (with an awesome Brisbane start-up, Liquid State) , a super handy web app framework, which took up a large portion of the conference.

I find that my peers at uni tend to be repulsed by Python, as it is the first language they're taught and it's associated with bad memories of understanding basic OO.

On Monday I attended Django Girls! Myself and a whole truckload of female developers created our own fully functional Django driven blogs. Here's mine: http://meimakesablawg.herokuapp.com/
It has the basic blog features with ability to log in, edit, create and publish posts. It's no blogger :3

Tutorial: http://tutorial.djangogirls.org/

The tutorial is really easy to follow and I strongly encourage anyone who wants to make their own web app at least to take a look. Django is very high level and is designed to make web development simple so you can get on with whatever you want to do.

The organiser, Elena was absolutely amazing and she gave me the prettiest tech book that I've ever seen. Two Scoops of Django 1.6 signed by the authors, Audrey and Daniel!! It's full of best practices in Django and illustrations featuring humanised ice creams.

 

Quality PyCon stash~ Shirts not pictured as they're in the wash.

The biggest thing I took away from PyCon is an understanding on how the open source community works. In order to keep Python a competitive language, it's necessary to get others involved. Because of this, basically everyone I talk to was super inclusive and willing to help.

^w^