Quick Announcements

• There’s no meeting next week due to Halloween!
• New Media at UCF is looking to hire within a range of experience. If you are graduating soon you can help contribute, or if you don’t have too much experience they will train you to work with them for the following semesters. If you would like more information, send a quick e-mail to: ian@ucf.edu.

- – - – - – - – - – -
The Techrangers are a team of students of varied backgrounds and majors at the Center for Distributed Learning who provide course development for faculty and web/application development for the University of Central Florida (UCF). The Techrangers act as student advocates and leaders by holding community workshops, participating in panels and presenting at conventions. They also take content from UCF professors and make it available via UCF’s WebCourses.

At this meeting the Techrangers demonstrated how to use Git, a free and open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. We discussed how to make a local repository (on your own machine) using Git. You need to download Git with a quick Google search and run it within either the Mac terminal or Windows terminal shell. You key in the “git init” command to start git and can make a file using “touch ___filename____.” You would then add it in the waiting area using “git add ___filename___.” To commit your file to the repository, you use “git commit -m “any comments you may have go here”.”

The presenters then showcased GitHub which is more for public use and to show off your code. It’s a remote repository that many people can use at once. ACM has its own GitHub account. You can “fork” existing projects to make a separate copy on your repository you can tinker with. For a private repository, you may pay for one on GitHub.

In general, some good sources for information on Git include CodeSchool which has its own free Git course and a free book on how to use Git is available online as well.

When it comes to the wide range of interviewing questions that may appear during your next interview, they all boil down to four major categories: coding, technical, behavior, and design. Which category your questions may come from all depends on what position you are looking for. Expect more coding questions for software developers and expect more abstract technical and design questions for program managers.

The interviewing process itself starts with a resume screen and can continue on to a phone interview lasting to at most one hour with a couple of questions. You may have multiple of these kind of phone interviews, some more technical than others. If you pass the phone interviewing round, you may be asked to visit the recruiters during an on-campus interviewing session which can have up to six questions – but such practices may depend on the company.

To prepare for the long battle through the various stages of the interviewing process, it is best to review your CS1 material: arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, trees and maybe even graphs. Know how to implement them and what run times to expect for different operations (such as finding and inserting).

During any problem presented to you, be sure that you understand the question (don’t be afraid to ask questions – they purposely make these questions vague!), provide test cases, pseudo code your solution, code your solution, and then run your test cases on your code. Do not worry about a full-proof solution; they are mostly looking for your thought process.

Be sure to look online for sample interviewing questions to familiarize yourself with what they may ask.

NEXT WEEK

Wednesday, 10/3, @ 6:30pm in HEC 111
ACM General Meeting

LINKS

September 19, 2012 – Technical Interview Prep Slides

The fall semester interviews for internship and full-time positions are underway among major developers. To help students prepare, ACM at UCF decided to have an informal internship panel consisting of students from Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Google, Intel, and even some research programs such as the REU program here at UCF and the Synthetic Reality Lab on Research Park. The panel covered how the interns were contacted about the position, the interviewing process, what their positions entailed, and their overall experience.

A lot of questions were about the hiring process for both industry and research level positions. Many of the panelists mentioned that it’s not just the GPA that will set you apart, but also being involved in any extracurricular activities related to technology and also personal projects. Personal projects are a great tool to showcase your knowledge during an interview and your passion for what you do. Some of the other questions dealt with the atmosphere of the companies and research labs.

NEXT WEEK

Wednesday, 9/19, @ 6:30pm in HEC 111
Practice Interview Session

LINKS

September 12, 2012 – Internship Panel Meeting Slides

September 5th marked the first Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) meeting of the Fall 2012 semester!

The first meeting was an introduction to what ACM is and what ACM plans to do for the rest of the upcoming school year. President Jeff Loppert gave the audience a sneak-peek of what’s to come. The slides from the presentation are available below if you would like to read through them yourself, otherwise here’s a quick run down on the need-to-know information you need to be an active ACM Member this year!

Officers

• President – Jeffrey Loppert
• Vice President – Alex Consunji
• Treasurer – Kristina Mazza
• Secretary – Jennifer Graham
• Public Relations – Matt Hyman

Past Events

• Research lab tours
• Guest Speakers
• Recruiting Sessions
• Career Building Activites
• … and more!

This year we plan to highlight our three focus areas: career building, technical workshops, and community service. We’ll have Google and Microsoft coming out to the UCF campus to meet with students and to conduct interview prep. We’ll also have some workshops on version control, Windows 8 AppLabs hosting development sessions on campus, and mobile application development. Within our community, we’ll be focusing on events such as the JDRF Walk, Relay for Life and Robots Rock! with WEECS.

We are also looking for some driven, active students to fill in leadership roles we have within ACM this year. The committees we have open at the moment are: Hackathon planning, webmaster, mentors, and potentially future officer positions. More details on each committee can be found in the slides linked below.

NEXT WEEK

Wednesday, 9/12, @ 6:30pm in HEC 111

Internship Panel
Want to intern, not sure how?
Peers will answer your questions and more!

LINKS

September 5, 2012 – First General Meeting Slides

Today ACM members were informed of all the ins-and-outs of software development from Jim Trentadue’s point of view. After going around the room and discussing our futures in software development and what we would like to accomplish, Mr. Trentadue began with an overall model of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The model divided the life cycle into its key phases and highlighted the positions and careers that are involved along the way.

The Project Initiation stage kicks off the project. This typically includes Project Coordinators, a Program Manager, and Project Managers. (A Program Manager oversees all of the projects within a department, and thus multiple project managers). We then have the Requirements stage where we find out the WHAT about the project – what needs to be included or excluded in the final product. This becomes the task of a Business Analyst who gathers the requirements by talking to the client one-on-one and communicates these ideas to a Systems Analyst for the technical details.

In the Design stage, we find out the HOW about the project: what the overall design of the project will look like and how it will meet the requirements laid out by the Business Analyst and client. This phase becomes the job of the Technical Lead, the Application Architect and perhaps also the System Analyst who spoke to the Business Analyst. The design comes in the form of prototypes, and this work typically is of more senior-level professionals. Once the design has been approved, the project then goes into the Construction/Coding stage in which the actually programming of the system is done. (A student coming out of college would typically work on bug-fixing of medium-priority level issues.)

Testing, the area that Jim Trentadue works in, handles a wide range of testing from unit, to system, to integration, to regression, to automated, to user acceptance, and performance (to find the breaking point of the project). After extensive testing, we then go into one of the later stages of Deployment which is very procedure-driven.

Another topic that Mr. Trentadue touched upon was outsourcing and how it is the concern of everyone in the field no matter what niche you may fall into. In an article by CIO.com titled 12 IT Outsourcing Predictions for 2012, Mr. Trentadue highlights some of the hot trends that we may see in the rest of the upcoming year to keep in mind during your job search.

Towards the end of his talk, he presented students with a to-do list of points to keep in mind after the presentation was over:

• Learn as many technologies as possible
• Enlist in professional organizations within your field of interest
• Get certified in different technical areas
• Subscribe to magazines like InformationWeek to stay up-to-date on the latest trends
• Ask when applying for a new job about their position on outsourcing and prepare yourself before going in with some facts.
• Find out what makes you stand out. Emphasize your processes, your documentation, and perhaps even that you do not mind travelling often. These are all aspects that may land you that perfect job!
• Remain energetic and fresh!

Today at 6PM, members attended a guest lecture by Chris Haddad on unlocking your inner entrepreneurial talents and using them to launch your dream career. Jeffery Loppert gave a short introduction for Chris Haddad highlighting his other speaking opportunities at various conferences and his current position as WS02′s VP of Technology Evangelism.

Chris first obtained his degree in Electrical Engineering and as part of his academic career was exposed to programming in languages like Ada, C, and Fortran. As such, he then shared some tips and advice as to how to start your own business and to grow in your career.

First he points out that one should follow their passion, plain and simple. If you’re going to spend 40 hours or more per week on your career choice, then it better be what you want to do everyday. The key is to finding your passion and to approach it from a business or economic perspective; identify what people need day-to-day that you can provide. He then cited an example site, Etsy, which is an open bazaar for crafts that allows people to create items and to sell them to a target consumer.

Be a builder; “delight your clients with ingenuity and bespoke craftsmanship.” What he means by this ambiguous statement is to find what you revel in creating – what only you can provide and to delight whomever your customers will be with your creativity, dedication, and passion. He mentioned that one “cannot make time” and so one should be productive – to think of a minimal, viable product and to iterate over it based on what people truly need. Be persistent about ideas!

Using the people that you know around you and to start off locally can be the baby steps one needs to reach the stable position of providing a service. Embrace the global economy and recruit global talent once you have a product. However, do not forget to establish a safety net to recover quickly from unexpected situations – a personal project or a company.

Also key is to maintain your own professional network on sites such as LinkedIn and to write a blog – something that you can share with like-minded people or potential employers about your current projects and insights. Hot topics right now, he mentioned, are: cloud computing, social, and mobile media.

Coming to the conclusion of his talk, he reiterated some of the points we wanted members to leave with and to muddle over: following your passion, being innovative, having drive, being persistent, and having a can-do attitude. Always say “yes” when opportunity knocks as you can surprise even yourself with what you are capable of.

To find out more about Chris Haddad, visit the following link, follow him on Twitter, or shoot him an e-mail:
blog.cobia.net/cobiacomm/
twitter@cobiacomm
mailto: haddadc@cobia.net

On Thursday, April 5th, ACM members funneled into Classroom 1 309 for a combo meeting full of elections, pizza, surprises and Google! First, officer elections were held for President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, and Public Relations Director positions. We decided to hold off on appointing additional leadership positions until the Fall semester once everyone is settled into their classes after a relaxing summer.

After some deliberation, the following list of students consist of the new officers of the ACM Chapter at the University of Central Florida:

President – Jeffrey Loppert
Vice President – Alex Consunji
Treasurer – Kristina Mazza
Secretary – Jennifer Graham
Public Relations – Matt Hyman

Following the elections, we then had a special presentation from Derek about the Harvard Business School Summer Venture in Management Program. We then had a surprise guest appearance from Raymond Ho via Google Hangout from the Mountain View Googleplex. He spoke with the students about how they can participate in the upcoming Google Code Jam. He went over the registration process, general rules, and prizes and covered how students can practice problems from previous contests and how students can view past participants solutions. The information he covered can be found in the FAQ section on the Code Jam website.

Finally, our meeting ended with the Google Easter Egg Hunt. All of the participants received a Google Wallet (a small folded Google Dry Erase sticker) and hunted down QR codes to Google gear like pens and key chains. The strips of paper were to be neatly tucked into the Google Wallet and members could come back and go through a Google Checkout process to receive the prizes.

[NEXT WEEK]

“Adopt an Entrepreneurial Spirit: Ownership, Branding, and Disruption” Guest Lecture
- Chris Haddad
Vice President of Technology Evangelism at WSO2
Melbourne, Florida Area Information Technology and Services
6PM at HEC 101

After a long week of classes, work, and other obligations – our members met up at the on-campus Tailgater’s for some respite. Among great food and friends, we conversed about all things computers (and somethings not so computers!). It was a welcoming break from the fast-paced college life we all get accustomed to.

!!–NEXT WEEK–!!

KNOW THAT:
1. There will be ***FREE PIZZA***
2. We’re going to hold Officer Elections – Write your friends name on a piece of paper
3. An Exciting Google Easter Egg Hunt — where you’ll receive a ton of free stuff!

PRIZES INCLUDE:
-Google Branded Leather Bound Notebooks
-Android pajama sleeping pants
-Google Brand Gym Bags
-Google Pens and Key chains

- (Courtesy of Jeffery Loppert)

Funneling into the CAVE at 6PM, ACM members were able to put their programming skills to the test – not just to land the perfect job but for bragging rights and prizes! Problems focused on a variety of different algorithms and skill-sets allowing members to write in C, Java, or Python. Prizes were awarded for most of the participants and the grand prize will be given out during the rest of the week!

Visit Shane Chism‘s website within the week to try out the problems yourself even if you could not attend last Thursday. You can download the problem set here. The contest will still be open for a week following the Thursday meeting, so give the problems a shot!

!!!–UPDATE–!!!

Now that the full week has passed and the prizes were handed out – here’s the information for all the latecomers:

Problem Set from the 3/22/2012 Event:
Click Here (Problems)

And below are the Contest Solutions for your enjoyment (Don’t look ahead! Really try the questions out!):
Click Here (Solutions)

In the previous weeks, we’ve heard about various internships and summer opportunities from leaders in industry. During those presentations, we learned about the application process. Building upon that experience we felt it was best to put our members to the test and see how they’d perform during a mock technical interview.

Before the coding session began, several announcements were discussed, including a join outreach program with WEECS. The program is designed to encourage young children to become interested in STEM ( Science, Technology, Engineering and Math ) disciplines. Volunteers work together to lead an activity designed to demonstrate basic Computer Science & Electrical Engineering Concepts utilizing LeTry Robots in a hands-on exercise that gets children engaged and motivated.

The technical questions consist of actual interview questions use by major companies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. The questions used were compiled from career building websites such as Career Cup and Glass Door. If you were unable to make the meeting, then please look at those web pages for some vital information on interviewing.

For the Interview Questions given at the meeting, follow this link. Remember above all: talk aloud, ask questions, and just relax & show them what you got!