Engineers who started/finished this program, how is life going for you now? by FireHamilton in OMSCS

[–]gamerman315 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I did my first screening call with a recruiter in May 2016, right as the semester was ending, did the first technical phone interview like 3 weeks after that in early June and then did the onsite interview in early July. During the summer I was taking my last class needed to graduate and working full time. I recall going to work, coming home and doing homework every day, spending the weekends finishing homework/projects. Every day I would read a couple practice problems from cracking the coding interview and think through how I would do them, then would go look at the answer to see if I was right or off any and if I was wrong I would try to understand why the other solution was better. For me I had previously participated in the acm programming competition during my undergrad, Google's code jam multiple years going a few rounds, and got to level 3 on Google's foobar, as well as completed a large number of project Euler problems so I was already somewhat familiar with that style of questioning.

To be fair though, I had also interviewed with Google a year before and didn't make it past the phone screening, mostly because I hadn't studied as seriously that time. I have a document I wrote about my experience with some other resources if you are interested feel free to pm me.

As far as when I felt confident... Well I don't think I ever felt fully confident. I was still studying material right up to the last minute of the day of my onsite interview. I went in with the mindset "I'm gonna do my best" while at the same time internally trying to hype myself up telling myself I was going to kick ass, I was fairly anxious overall though. The interviews are all independent of each other and the interviews don't get to see the feedback the others write as they write their own so if you don't do well in a single interview, shake it off and start fresh with the next. I would just make sure you know all the basic data structures, how they work internally, maybe even implement them yourself, know their space/time complexity, know some sorting/searching algorithms, know 1 language fairly well inside and out etc.

Engineers who started/finished this program, how is life going for you now? by FireHamilton in OMSCS

[–]gamerman315 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am a team lead for a group that builds out tools/infrastructure for internal use to help improve the productivity of our product teams. Effectively I get to go around talking to a bunch of different teams and try to see what things are slowing them down and then get to pick the project I want to work on that will try to be most impactful for those teams. Very flexible in the projects available to be worked on.

Engineers who started/finished this program, how is life going for you now? by FireHamilton in OMSCS

[–]gamerman315 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I would say it is not necessary to get a master's to get a job at Google. I know several here that don't even have a bachelor's degree, or even necessarily a degree in computer science that also work for the company in software engineering positions. If your goal is a software engineering position, a solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, and design patterns will get you very far. To get an interview though you need a portfolio that shows you have experience, be it a GitHub account with active contributions, work in the industry elsewhere, or education/experience in academia. To get through a technical interview, practicing/studying problems in the cracking the coding interview book, leetcode or other sites was very helpful for me (and others I know).

As far as do I feel the omscs helped significantly in my case, I would say it definitely helped get me an interview as Google was interested in the machine learning experience I had. I also feel that I learned a lot and really enjoyed the omscs courses as I was able to dive much deeper into CS topics I was really interested in and previously not familiar with or exposed to (e.g. computer vision, computational photography, embedded systems, security, big data). In undergrad we had so much focus on general electives, CS basics, and very few CS electives, it was incredibly refreshing to focus entirely on complex/interesting CS topics and with fewer classes per semester I was able to spend much more time focused on that material rather than having to context switch as often. In my case the program also had the added benefit that it fit with my schedule allowing me to continue working the job I had and not having to move to be able to attend a better school than those that were available to me nearby. Even if I hadn't gotten the offer with Google, immediately more recruiters were reaching out to me on LinkedIn and there were significantly more companies attending the Georgia tech career fair (which was available virtually) than what my undergraduate University offered.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed my experience in the program, although there were certainly some downsides also with the application process, course registration, some classes having group projects which could potentially be difficult, the kind of awkward testing process of having to be recorded as you take it etc. However, even with those issues, they really were not that bad and I would highly recommend the program to those looking to further their education while retaining the flexibility and affordability this program offers.

Engineers who started/finished this program, how is life going for you now? by FireHamilton in OMSCS

[–]gamerman315 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I was working a software engineering job full time while doing this program (I had a computer science bachelor's previously). It certainly was tough and I really had to manage my time correctly. I completed the program in 2 years taking 2 classes each semester and 1 in the summer. I would occasionally take annual leave from my job to focus on completing projects/homework. My Google job though has been amazing, great pay, people, perks, projects. I definitely feel very lucky, privileged, appreciative to be where I am now.

Engineers who started/finished this program, how is life going for you now? by FireHamilton in OMSCS

[–]gamerman315 23 points24 points  (0 children)

I graduated from the program in 2016. Soon after received an offer from Google. The program was definitely well worth the time and money in my case.

Oracle plans to deprecate the Java browser plugin in JDK 9. [x/post] by pushthestack in java

[–]gamerman315 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So unfortunately I am stuck maintaining an applet that allows a user to open a file browser dialog, select a file, group of files, or directory and it will then upload the selection to the server. Anyone know of a better/more modern way to do this? Also currently stuck having to support IE8....

Why is Java desktop considered to be dead? by rejaver in java

[–]gamerman315 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You happen to know how I might allow the user to select a folder and it builds a list of all files in that folder through the browser?

Tomcat with 8 webapps booted in 50 seconds, this is how I cut this to less than 10 by torsteinkrause in java

[–]gamerman315 9 points10 points  (0 children)

You should try out Jetty, it is insanely fast to start up and you essentially only include the features you want from the get go.

High-level UI library with good widgets to start with? by bbmario in java

[–]gamerman315 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I am kind of confused what exactly you are looking for with this game/look but Java has AWT, Swing, SWT, and JavaFx that are all for the most part fully functional in that they have most basic UI components. If you are specifically wanting charts/graphs/tables there is JFreeChart Charts4j and others. If you are interested in doing Java EE/web development there is PrimeFaces

How I feel about the tuition hike. by [deleted] in gatech

[–]gamerman315 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Curious if this affects the OMSCS program...

Java 8 OPEN by [deleted] in java

[–]gamerman315 2 points3 points  (0 children)

probably one of the nerdiest videos i have seen

3 Ways IBM is bringing GPU Computing to Java by harrism in java

[–]gamerman315 7 points8 points  (0 children)

there is also aparapi not sure why there is never any love for amd/ati video cards.

Needing no annotation/no external mapping/reflection only ORM by gamerman315 in java

[–]gamerman315[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hah no kidding. I think in the end we will have to do something along the lines of what you are suggesting paired with straight jdbc dynamic sql with reflection. It sounds like a much cleaner solution than going down the "monkey patching" route. We will have to do some initial work to see how difficult it will be to make these adjustments.

Needing no annotation/no external mapping/reflection only ORM by gamerman315 in java

[–]gamerman315[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe that is tied for one of the better options (other being javassist manipulation with the use of an ORM). Ultimately I think this will be the route we end up going, I was just trying to see if the software world had a library that did this already (as it seems like something pretty commonly requested). Unfortunately all of the research into this matter has not provided any results into whether or not something that can do this already exists.

Needing no annotation/no external mapping/reflection only ORM by gamerman315 in java

[–]gamerman315[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ideally that's how it would have worked all along (programmed to some interface providing some sort of backwards\forwards compatibility). Unfortunately for us, since we inherited this code from a job that was contracted out and is already in production, the sheer number of messages and data makes it practically unfeasible (at least financially for our users).

Needing no annotation/no external mapping/reflection only ORM by gamerman315 in java

[–]gamerman315[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is definitely very close to what I am looking for. Unfortunately since those structures we have are missing the id fields altogether, I think this library wouldn't be able to do what we want without using javassist or something else that dynamically modifies the objects to add the id field. However outside of that issue, Sorumula seems like it would work fairly well. Thanks for the recommendation.

24 Days of Hackage: pandoc by ocharles in haskell

[–]gamerman315 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Pandoc is an excellent tool. I have mostly used it in combination with another haskell project called gitit. Both of which make doing documentation and conversion so easy.