Career

What if the role of the software developer is not actually about writing software? What if the most important thing I can do today isn’t to write a sweet recursive function that delights and confuses the next human that reads it in equal measure? As our industry has matured, the roles of technical staff in an organisation have changed. Increasingly, companies require that technical folk interact with customers. Some people like this. Some don’t. Let’s have a brief chat about the opportunities and costs of this happening and what that might mean for your progression through the industry and your life. ...

One thing the Army is good at is teaching you how to function under immense pressure, for extended periods. Speaking briefly about my credentials in this area, I’ve spent just under five years in the Army, nine months of which were in Afghanistan as part of a NATO mission with the New Zealand Defence Force. As with everything, there are folk out there with more experience than me, who have done it harder, for longer. I still feel it’s worth sharing this experience as perhaps the way I do that resonates with you, as the way others share their experience resonates with others. ...

Oh the times, they are a changin' The past month has been crazy. In the past month, I’ve started a new role, my son has started crawling, I’ve helped launch the second season of Overtime on a brand new technical stack, they only thing that hasn’t changed is this blog, I’ve been neglecting it. Work has slowed down a bit before christmas, so now seems like a good time to post an update. ...

In hindsight I feel like I focussed more on the soft skills needed to get an internship and how to actually go about it, so this time I’ll provide a bit of insight into the actual technical skills that I feel you need (or I need, at least I need while I’m here at Spark) Let’s be clear right at the start, I have used maybe 15% ~ 20% at best, of the knowledge I learned at University. Most surprising of all is that most of what I have used, came from a stage one course. Yeah that course in HTML that everybody turns their noses up at because it’s for plebians who can’t into C? Take it. You’ll earn dollars with that course. ...

This is an article I wrote for Spark Ventures I’m currently Interning for them) on how I got my internship, and how others can break into the IT Industry. My writing style still isn’t great, so it was good to be given an excuse to practice! ================================= I have loved technology ever since I was a wee nipper. I confused a lot of people when I joined the Army after college but that decision was key (more on that another time though). I left the Army in time to enroll in Semester Two 2013 at the University of Auckland. I sit here now, on the top floor of Spark City in Auckland, and I feel very, very fortunate. ...

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) ...

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!