Awards!!!

I received my award for my thesis last night at the annual awards banquet for the engineering college. It was nice to be recognized for my achievements as I put a lot of work into the thesis research. It was hard, but I really enjoyed it all. The fact that I enjoyed it so much makes me really want to consider doing the PhD program. Mrs. Black Dilbert is considering getting her PhD as well so maybe we can be study buddies. Hmm... The Dr. Black Dilbert's doesn't sound too bad.

No Design Questions in Interviews???

I'm sitting in on a technical interview tomorrow and as I was skimming through the resume and coming up with questions I had an interesting thought...

Why do design techniques never come into play in technical interviews??

Now I know that some companies might possibly give someone an "oral examination" where they have them design a component on a white board, but in all my interviews I've never been given a test or had to answer real questions on OOAD. Now, I have been given programming tests out the wazoo. But honestly, who cares if you can program the world with C# delegates or perform pointer arithmetic (yuck!!) if you can't take a simple functional specification document and transform it into an end product that meets the end user expectations?

If software engineering is ever going to truly be considered an engineering discipline we need to move past the processes of simply testing knowledge of programming languages. Programming languages are nothing more than tools to a software engineer. We need to be hitting the software engineering concepts as the true gauge in hiring as I have met many a person who could ace a programming test and then turn in an application where all of the code existed in one long file...

Secret Revealed...

So I teased you a week or so ago with the promise of some upcoming news... Well the news is....

As you know I decided (at the last minute) to write a thesis to complete my Master's degree. It took a lot of work and a lot of sleepless nights, but I completed it. All the time I put into it has come back to me because I have won an award for my thesis! That's right, Black Dilbert can be considered an "Award-Winning Author" now. My thesis was named the "Outstanding Master's Thesis of 2007" for the Computer Science & Engineering department. I was very shocked when my supervising professor sent me an email with the news two weeks ago. It was very hard to not share it and tell the world as I am very happy about all of this.

The professors have been telling me that I need to come back for the PhD program and I think they might be right... Who am I to deny the future software engineers of the world the opportunity to learn from an "Award-Winning Author" haha!!

On another note, my supervising professor has just been offered tenure so the good fortune is all around these days.

Ubuntu???

So, I am finally getting drawn towards the Ubuntu craze... I have an old PC that has no chance of being upgraded to XP or Vista. It would be a waste of time and money to do either. So it is going to become my new development and storage PC. I don't think it will be too difficult, but I need some other things to happen first.

1. I need to actually go buy some CD-R discs so I can burn the install disk.
2. I need to get a KVM switch so I don't have to have 2 sets of peripherals.
3. I need some actual time to sit down and do the install, haha.

So wish me luck!! I'll post screen shots once I get it up and running. Who knows... If I really like it I can put it on my old laptop as well!!

Breaking News...

Oh, I only thought I was done with academia for a while. I may have some exciting news on the academic front, but I cannot share it yet. I'm waiting on a few more things to come through and then I will share. Until then... wait in suspense!!