I got a rejection letter from a grad school I applied to. I shouldn't be bummed out because I decided to go with this lucrative systems engineering position at Lockheed Martin. They have a pretty cool tuition reimbursement benefit that I could take advantage of if I wanted to go back and get my masters degree in.
I discovered something too. I really only wanted to do grad school because I wanted to put off the inevitable "real world". I still wanted to be the academic type and try to soak up some better skills before I hit the corporate world. I feel like I could probably learn more at a job than I could sitting in classrooms for the next two years.
Goals for the first year out of college: taking lots of risks with big payoffs. Not like financial or well-being risks, but ones where I have to get out of my comfort zone or learn something new.
Also, if you're looking at job interviews and feel nervous, read the DailyWTF's interview stories. No matter what you do at your interview, it can't be worse than these.
Posted by austin
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I got a job offer from Lockheed Martin! This is exciting, because in the next month, all of America's colleges are going to be spewing out graduates who need jobs. Let me re-iterate that Northern Virginia is an awesome place to be an engineer or computer science major. All this out-sourcing talk doesn't work when the companies hiring are government contractors who need U.S. citizens who can obtain security clearances. Lockheed Martin actually gave me the choice of 5 different positions as either a systems engineer or a software engineer. All the positions have a very nice salary (slightly above what I asked for).
The one thing that I'm not sure about is what I'll actually be doing. At my interview, the project managers couldn't give me specifics about the projects since they require a security clearance. I'm pretty excited about it though.
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If you're reading this, then I managed to SQL inject my own database code.
I've been writing my final paper for my secure software engineering on SQL injection attacks. I decided to see if I could break into my own web app that handles the blog entries you're reading now. About 24 hours later, I finally crafted the right query string that will get me access without a password. Ugh, I'm going to have to re-work some of this code now. At the same time, I'm pretty psyched that I could break something that at one point I thought was "secure".
Also quick plug for my hosting company, Free Hostia. I've been with them for exactly one year now. They have been the best free host I have ever used.
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I have a paper due on SQL injection attacks due next week. I needed a way to quickly write up some vulnerable PHP code for the paper that could run on a MySQL/Apache backend. The only problem is that I'm running this on an old Windows 2000 machine and getting all the components to work correctly would be a pain. I would probably spend more time reading docs and getting configuration files right than writing the actual demonstration code.
I remembered at the last cyber defense tournament, the Windows database server was running a tool called XAMPP so I downloaded it to give it a shot. I'm now a firm believer that this is the best way to get a WAMP box up and running. Seriously, in about 4 clicks, you have all the best tools for a web application server, including Apache 2.2, PHP5, MySQL, Perl, phpMyAdmin, Filezilla FTP server, Mercury mail server, plus a few other cool scripts.
So if you plan on using this, you probably won't be using every single component, and for security reasons, you should restrict what's not needed. Additionally, there's a lot of default passwords that need to be changed and some of the packaged software is not the most recent version. Overall, a very cool suite of tools in one package.
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I'm doing a presentation on XML web services and SOAP on Wednesday for my CS347: Web Information Systems class. I wrote up a quick web service client that connects to a remote SOAP server and gets a weather report. I think that the original data comes from NOAA, but this one uses data from a .NET web service from webservicex.net.
WeatherClient2.zip
I also included the source code. It's all written in Java and if you at least know the basics, you should be able to figure things out. A few times, my client will throw some SOAPExceptions, but I think that's because the server I'm using is a little wonky.
JAX-WS makes writing web services and clients incredibly easy and I'm trying to stress that point in my presentation. In fact, about 90% of my code is probably doing UI stuff, and the code that does perform network interactions is all generated by wsimport, which, if I'm not mistaken, is now part of the Java SE.
Posted by austin
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I had an interview with Lockheed Martin over the weekend in their Arlington/DC office. Since my college is so close to northern Virginia, the military and government contractors love to drive down and grab up computer science majors. Lockheed Martin looks like a pretty cool company to work for. I mean, just watch the promo video
Oooh, chills. The interview went pretty smoothly. I was there with other computer science majors and electrical engineering majors. We all looked remarkably the same; your basic prototypical geek, although in more of the chic style you see now (sub out the pocket calculator for an iPhone, etc). The HR rep told us that most of the interviews would be non-technical and more behavioral (I spent the previous week reviewing my data structures and algorithm analysis techniques. This was a relief). Only one of my interviews was really about code and it was more shop talk, which was chill. He asked me what development environment I used. Eclipse? JEdit? I told him vi and the command line. He laughed. In my defense, I think it lets you get more intimate with the code, although it can be harder when a project begins to grow.
Posted by austin
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I scheduled my first real job interview. Like for a real job and not one where I make espresso or get shopping carts from a parking lot. It's with Lockheed Martin. I'm pretty excited because Lockheed Martin is a pretty big name in the northern Virginia/DC government contractor scene. They must like my resume since they want me to come up to Arlington to do a 3 hour interview/security check. They're even paying for my hotel. I bought a new suit for the interview. The guy at Mens Wearhouse says I have bony sholder blades but a lot of guys have this problem. Also I just noticed that it's Wearhouse not Warehouse.
I saw Richard M Stallman at the University of Virginia. I actually skipped my own class today to drive an hour to attend another lecture. I can't agree with everything that he advocates (he has some wacky views about software piracy), but I can definitely get behind some of his work with the FSF to bring free (both "gratis" and "open") software to educational institutions that might otherwise be forced into buying expensive licenses. Also I'm going to come clean and say that I'm a vi user. There. I said it.
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Career Fair Survival Pack Checklist
-Altoids For that minty fresh breath
-Hand Sanitizer for post-handshake germ killing (I shook a lot of hands)
-Leather bound portfolio (well fake leather, but it looks nice)
-16 copies of my résumé If I had time they would be on nicer paper.
-Messenger bag To hold all my free corporate swag
-Wingman (this is a designated individual who's sole purpose is to make you look better).
Job fair! So I'm graduating from college and I need work that doesn't involve me making coffee at 4 AM. My university held a job fair yesterday and I decided to try to get my name out there. Because JMU is close to nothern virginia, most of the companies looking for CS majors were government contractors or government agencies. These are the outrageously cool jobs that can't be outsourced. Lots of companies were looking for people to do information security too, which is cool since I just got back from cyber defense tournament.
I have a few interviews already lined up. Hooray for gainful employment.
Posted by austin
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other things i like.
the elegant universeFree PHP hosting provided by FreeHostia.com
