In both cases, I was contacted out of the blue by a Google recruiter. The first time I had been considering looking for a new role and pursued it immediately; the second time I hadn't been and put off the recruitment process for several months, during which the same recruiter contacted me again twice to follow up. If nothing else, that's a nice ego boost, but a more cynical mind might be considering the shotgun approach to a narrow recruiting filter and commissions :D

First, a quick data point, I was applying for an SRE(SA) position on both occasions - Site Reliability Engineer (System Administration), because in most of my roles to date, I've been doing both sysadmin and development work and I've never seemed to drift towards one pigeonhole or another. SRE(SA) seemed optimal - interesting sysadmin work on large-scale systems and quite a bit of tool-writing to boot. This was decided on between myself and the recruiter, based on the self-assessment form you are given to fill out. I would love to know how they get around illusory superiority and the Dunning-Kruger effect with those forms, especially given the wierd bias they'd have in the dataset from having so many of the best in their fields working there.

Both times, the process proceeded in the same way:

Ray asked to see what the output of the kada2 script I’ve been working on looks like – only problem is that I’ve been using a real datafile for development, so it has people’s names in it. To avoid any shoutyness, one quick python script to read in the members.kda file and write it back out to test.kda with all the names changed to John Smith; then a quick run with this file as the members.kda file and some imagemagick conversions and viola, the current kada.py output.

The free rifle ladders look identical to that page.

The next three pages are from report.pdf, and generally aren’t meant to be posted for the club, they’re more for the club committee to track stuff as it’s happening in the club:

Those two pages are fairly straightforward (and mostly used to track performance of the folks who are shooting in the ladders for things like squad selection and so forth.

That page is somewhat less than perfect right now! The pie charts aren’t awful for seeing what’s happening, but the labelling is awful. More work required…

Here are the actual pdf files if you want them:

ladders.pdf

report.pdf

As I mentioned before, after writing a python script to read in Kada’s data files on the rifle club shooters’ scores and calculate new ladders, the next step is output that’s a bit fancier than the straight ASCII text dump:

Novice Air Ladder
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 1         Joe D'Plumber    45  91.833    94
 2         Joe D'Plumber    36  87.500    91
 3         Joe D'Plumber    18  87.167    92
 4         Joe D'Plumber    16  85.833    91
 5         Joe D'Plumber    26  85.167    92
 6         Joe D'Plumber    31  81.167    87
          Tito D'Builder     2  76.000    76  *
 7         Joe D'Plumber     7  74.000    82
          Tito D'Builder     2  69.000    75  *
          Tito D'Builder     2  67.000    68  *
          Tito D'Builder     2  66.000    70  *
          Tito D'Builder     1  64.000    64  *
 8         Joe D'Plumber    10  63.167    78
          Tito D'Builder     1  62.000    62  *
 9         Joe D'Plumber     4  61.750    76
          Tito D'Builder     2  61.500    72  *
          Tito D'Builder     1  60.000    60  *
          Tito D'Builder     2  55.500    71  *
          Tito D'Builder     2  55.000    58  *
10         Joe D'Plumber     3  53.667    62
          Tito D'Builder     1  52.000    52  *
          Tito D'Builder     1  50.000    50  *
          Tito D'Builder     1  49.000    49  *

This does the basic job that the original system did (actually, it does a bit more – the asterisks mark out those shooters who haven’t yet shot enough cards to get on the ladder, but they’re still listed as an incentive for them to shoot more cards – the current system doesn’t do this). It’s not really doing all that can be done, however, and it’s certainly not all that fancy-looking. Especially in a scripting language, where the whole point is to do fancy stuff quickly through toolkits. So, … Read the rest

One of the downsides of working on a pre-startup project is that you really can’t say much about it. Seriously. You think Cryptonomicon seemed paranoid about security? You’ve just never met the folks who safeguard possible IP for college spin-outs. Yowza. And it’s a shame because some of this stuff is really rather nifty, and it’s been good to not only do some high-level design of low-level stuff, but also to get back to implementing in C and for high-capacity stuff as well.

However, side projects are totally fair game

At the moment, most of my side-project time has gone into a quick script for the rifle club in college. It has to read in a text file and do some basic statistics on the data therein. PHP would blaze through this in a web setting, but to my mind, PHP is out of its depth when not running on a webserver so I thought something else would be more appropriate. Perl is certainly up to the task, as is Ruby and I’ve been wanting to learn Ruby for a while, but some upcoming PhD stuff requires me to know Python, so I figured this would be a good starting point for it, so apt-get install python and away I went. 

First, the problem. There’s a program my college rifle club uses called Kada, which tracks members names and details and scores and produces charts of the club’s “ladders”, a sort of running competition which tracks shooters’ performances over the year (there’s a small prize at the end). The problem isn’t Kada itself – it is pretty much a textbook case of how you develop a user interface, even if it is character-mode. Keith, who developed Kada, spent ages refining the user interface by actually using it and talking to … Read the rest