Monday, October 21, 2013

Back to the blogging world & plans for the autumn

It has been quite a while since my first post. A lot has happened in between in both my personal life and regarding my journey to become a software professional. I landed my first summer job as a software developer in a tiny start-up company last spring. What I did was mostly scripting on Python, dealing with databases and UNIX related scripting but also some GUI  adjustments in both C++/Eclipse and Java/Spring Tool Suite. I learned a lot, and more than anything, to trust into my logical thinking and potential. Even though my Master's thesis is still in progress, I am now more relaxed about my future career as ever.

Interesting things are coming up, such as Rails Girls Oulu in 8th - 9th November. Last year the event was very successful and one could really feel the enthusiasm, This year I decided to apply as a mentor and thus have a good reason to delve into the world Ruby and Rails development for a while. Web-development is something I have wanted to try my skills at for a long time and Ruby on Rails. There is also another Ruby related event in Oulu, RubySauna. There are enthusiastic developers present and I hope we'll be able to make also the women's sauna interesting. ;)

Besides the thesis writing, I will have to find time for getting really into Android development. One of the most demanding (and rewarding) courses in my Master's program is Android development course. I'm now installing the new development platform Android Studio, since it seems to be the next big thing in Android development even if Eclipse plug-in based tools are still going strong.


Here are the websites of the Ruby related events I mentioned:
http://railsgirls.com/oulu
https://tito.io/ruby-sauna/ruby-sauna-october-2013

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Raspberry Pi - Introduction on Baking Pi


I'm starting my last programming course for my degree of information processing science in the spring, and after I heard a rumour that we'll work with Raspberry Pis, I wanted to make some queries on acquiring one of my own. That is, if they know where to buy one so that I don't necessarily have to wait for months as one of my friends told happened to him. However, the lecturer of the course told that the Raspberry Pis at our department are actually free for students to borrow before the course where they will be used starts in March. I decided that this is a great chance to get  an excuse to get some extra programming exercise and also to get my hands on Raspberry Pi before I'll decide whether to invest on one.

As I wanted to have some starting point and also material on which I could make a required learning diary (requirement for getting my hands on a Pi ;)) and noticed that University of Cambridge has a free online course on building a very simple operating system on the Raspberry Pi (You can find it here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/freshers/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/). The focus is on getting the operating system to interact with the hardware, and the code will be written almost completely on assembly language, and here, since we are working with Raspberry Pi, the variety of assembler code will be ARMv6.

I'm sure most of the developer community has by now heard more than enough about what Raspberry Pi is all about, so I'll happily skip all that (If you don't have or simply want to see what is hot right now the raspberrypi.org is probably the best place to go). All I have to say is that starting to play around with Raspberry Pi has been made really easy with all the beginner-friendly material online. I got an element14 SD-card with Debian 6 for Linux pre-installed on it and there was no extra work needed before getting to start working on the project.