Hi there, My name is Alex. I’ve no idea if anybody will read this, it’s more for my own sanity anyway so that’s fine! I’m a student at the University of Auckland, currently working over summer as an intern for Spark Ventures. I’m loving being back in a real job. Don’t get me wrong, University is great, but the amount of time I wasted every day sleeping in until 11am because I didn’t have class until noon, was ridiculous. ...

Next week on Tuesday, the Summer of Tech Meet and Greet will be going down range. I’m looking forward to it! It’s going to be interesting to be attending this year’s meet and greet on the other side of the fence. Last year I attended as a prospective intern, it was a loud, chaotic and hectic environment. I feel like it suited me well! This time I’m going to be looking at it from the Employer perspective. I’ve been handling Spark Venture’s Summer of Tech efforts this year as well as dealing with sponsorship stuff, running bootcamps and of course, running the Hackfest (that we held at the awesome Spark City Conference center) ...

This now constitutes v3.0 of my personal website and sounding board. It’s been a long journey from some bloated and slow bootstrap template that I picked up and cannibalised, to a bespoke website written in Pure CSS with a Wordpress Blog component - to the current (as at 25 Aug 15) iteration. Currently the site is hosted off github pages. It’s Jekyll with Foundation 5 at the core, I’m using markdown and liquid to handle blog posts. ...

I’m donating blood today. It’ll be my 20th donation. Probably around 4 were whole blood, another 6 were plasma, the remaining 10 being apheresis aka platelet donations. I’m O- so my blood is quite useful, it can be given to anyone. Mostly it goes to newborns. That’s always been a pretty cool thing for me, but when my own little one was born it made things quite a bit more important. Tobias was born premature due to a rare condition my wife had. He narrowly avoided the neo-natal intensive care unit (a few days earlier or a few tens of grams less and he would have gotten a sweet incubator) ...

On Thursday my son, Tobias, will be one month old. The days are getting longer but the weeks are getting shorter! I’ve been neglecting this platform, but haven’t forgotten about it. At Uni, exams times are approaching, I’ll be posting all of my revision notes on the blog - to keep me honest and keep everything searchable. In the time between posts I’ve been crazy busy. Juggling Uni with work and having a son, while still doing pet projects for my own learning. A while back a few friends and I started something called overtime, It’s a very exciting project - www.overtime.nz. I also joined an ARMA 3 Clan called SOCOMD, I’m rewriting the website and blog they use on my own time, and they’re very pleased with what I’ve done so far. Check it out at www.socomd.azurewebsites.net. Another very cool project. ...

I have been offline for a long long time. Here’s the situation. Last Friday, my wife Laura and I found out she is 34 weeks pregnant with a potentially life threatening complication, forcing her to remain in Hospital. We have been overwhelmed with the generosity of our family and friends, we are truly grateful for all the love and support we have received thus far. I have been meaning to write up all my notes and use this blog for revision. I still intend to do that. I have been attending lectures but unfortunately am so time poor apart from that, that I have loads of text files that need formatting, media added and additional detail before I can upload them here. I still intend to do that, but it will take time I don’t have now. Hopefully I can fully catch up during the mid semester break. ...

I’ve decided that it’s not accurate to call the python project a crypto project..yet. Initially it will be a text scrambler of some kind. I’m also taking a bit of time off the project to work on making sure my employment docs (CV etc) are all up to date for the coming year. You never know when you might need something like that on short notice. I also bought a great book today with a bunch of coding exercises in it. I might again take time off the scrambler in the future to work through those programs, as they are waaay more likely to help me in interviews than that program (at least when it comes to answering technical questions).

Okay, so it’s not really crypto. At least not yet. I started writing the GUI in tkinter, but have decided to try a newer tech called Kivy - which allegedly has multitouch support and other such features I don’t really need. Neat! Also, started reading ‘Cracking the Code Interview’ - this book makes me appreciate how little in know about interviewing! I’ve got a lot of work to do if I want to bum rush the bigger software firms!

I had a bit of down time after work today so I thought I would go over some hash functions. I never really got hash tables. Like truly understood them. I could see the purpose but where was the justification for them being everywhere? Fortunately Uni is exactly the time and place to be smashed down for having silly thoughts like that! Hashing is used for a whole lot of really useful, really cool stuff. Or hash functions rather ...

Note to self: Be patient when changing domain name. This site was down for most of the day today because I was an impatient prick. Be patient!