This week in Software Engineering, we had our first guest speaker from Bloomberg. He gave us an overview of the tools and technologies he used on the job as well as advice on finding a job. I think one of the best pieces of advice he gave was to evaluate during interviews whether you would like to work with your interviewer and to realize that interviewers are probably doing the same to you. As I interview in the next few weeks, I definitely need to keep this in mind.

We also turned in our first assignment this Thursday. Although the assignment was really simple, I had a lot of fun playing around with different optimizations for caching. I was originally only planning on implementing the simplest cache and calling it a day. Fortunately (or unfortuantely, depending on how you look at it), there was a Piazza post for posting timings for the solutions that were submitted to Sphere. As more people started posting faster timings, I felt motivated to make improvements to the cache and join in on the fun! When I finally got everything to work for a decent amount of time, there was definitely a sense of accomplishment. I’m looking forward to the rest of the projects in this class!

My tip for this week is related to job searching. The CNS Career Services has a Facebook Page where they post all the upcoming events. It’s really helpful to subscribe to these events to get notifications on upcoming info sessions, tech talks, and career fairs.