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A Less Intensive Week

This week is less intensive after the five CS3217 problem sets are over.I polished the ORC project to make it a splitView in iPad as a potencial application for my FYP. I also reviewed the Ray Tracing lecture notes and started to think about my career after graduation.

Honestly, I'm still unclear about my future. I sent out three copies of CVs in the NUS career fair one month ago. Two of which are EE companies,Micron and ABB, whose automation products look quite appealing to me but don't really fit my skill sets. The other one is Garena,which is a gaming platform company. I was mainly attracted by their company culture and talented developers. No news from Micron or ABB, but I did get a chance to go for interview in Garena the next day after sending the CV. The interviewer was a C++ geek and I became nobody when he asked me about detailed C++ questions.

In the SOC career fair few weeks ago, I also sent out three CVs. One Japanese game company(Tecmo Koei),one Silicon Valley Startup(NEO)and another Singapore health care company(iHis). For Tecmo Koei, they sent out a lot of examine papers to test the potential employees and focus less on the actual skills, which destroyed my passion for gaming and the company. I went for their final interview and thankfully, I didn't get it. For iHis, they will not be recruiting until late march.

This Wednesday, I went for a pair coding exercise with NEO. It's a really interesting startup company where I find my skill sets relavent. They make web apps as well as mobile apps. The company comes from Silicon Valley and the Singapore office now has around 10 employees, mostly software engineers. The one-hour pair coding exercise aims for test-driven development. One developer writes the testing functions and the other writes the actual class method implementation. We are taught about testing in school, however, this is my first time to be demoed about the actual process. The young programmer from CMU guided me through the implementation of a SET data structure from a scratch.  That was a good experience. However, the company doesn't seem to have enough vacancies at this moment. I may need to apply again some other day.

Besides these companies, I also applied for a digital publishing startup, where I happened to meet one of my friends, Aldrian who is a very programmer&scientist. The company is not that great, but at least Aldrian got the chance to do research on NLP without worrying about salary. Good for him.
The CEO is a NUS PHD. We had a short chat and he found it not a good match.

The job seeking process is really not fun. It's also a bit discouraging. What's worse, I have more important things to work on and I don't have enough time for the interviews. Well, I guess I'll eventually find one before August, but it's certainly not worth spending so much time on it. To make a better use of this coming summer vocation seems to be a more important task at hand. I may do CVWO,intern in China, or work on my own projects... Actually, I also sent out a CV to Spotify NYC, however, I don't think that's going to happen. Thanks to Prof.Ben who introduced Spotify's asian director to me. I get to know that technology is only part of an entrepreneurial innovation, a lot more need to be done to make things really work.

Another good thing about this week: I bought a ticket to the Script's concert. I got to know the Irish band via Spotify and I like their music.

Bad thing: Better go&review graphics rendering technics, otherwise,I'll cry next week.

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