Awarded the Best Group Project in Advanced IT Project

 

My project group, Group G has been recently awarded the Best Group Project in CSSE3005 Advanced IT Project which is one of the School of ITEE's flagship courses. The picture was taken at the last lecture where our Head of School, Professor Paul Strooper announced and presented the awards, followed by the system demonstration by the best and runner-up groups.

Our group consists of six members and we are all from different countries including Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and China. Every one of us was assigned a role and I was the lead programmer of the group. Throughout the semester we went through a lot of challenges and hurdles and it was certainly a valuable experience.

Security @ Suncorp IT

Last Wednesday, in conjunction with the Career Fair at University of Queensland, an IT Security Advisor from Suncorp and UQ Alumnus, Ben Waugh had a presentation on IT security at the Social Science and Humanities library. I have always been very interested in computer security and ethical hacking (okay I need to stress on the word 'ethical'). So I attended the talk despite it was held at 5pm and I had tonnes of assignments due in two day time.

The presentation turned out to be interesting and informative. In fact, the speaker, Ben Waugh demonstrated on a test website how he could hack into some of the real world websites by exploiting the system vulnerability with SQL injection. It was certainly not something new to me as I already learned and tried such attack a few years ago. Actually I was expecting more hacking techniques such as session hijacking, cross-site scripting, man-in-the-middle attack, etc but I think he didn't have sufficient time and also there were some non-technical students in the hall.

Having said that, I had a good chat with Ben after the presentation while we were enjoying the free pizza. He was kind enough to give me some tips on how to perform well during the interview and he encouraged me to apply to Suncorp. His advice truly inspired and motivated me to work out my resume and submit the job application to the company. Unfortunately Suncorp does not accept applicants without permanent residency or citizenship.I guess I will send him an email soon and then cross my fingers...

Google Tech Talk at University of Queensland

Wow it was so exciting! Indeed I can hardly calm myself down even though the event is already over. The presentation was awesome but what was even more fantastic was to have the opportunity to talk to the Google software engineers. I managed to obtain some useful advice from them as to how we should perform during the job interviews with Google. In addition, I got to know more about how the software engineers do things differently at Google.

There were two main topics - Disaster Relief Maps and scaling up Blogger. The first talk was delivered by James McGill and Ben Stewart, if I am not mistaken. The content was very interesting as I am currently doing an IT project which involves Google Maps API. The second talk was delivered by Andrew Over and he focused on how to make Blogger scalable. It was informative but I didn't manage to understand everything as I have not got much experience in distributed computing.

At the end of the tech talk, we had free pizza and some giveaways. Everyone just mingled around and the Googlers were very friendly and interesting. Before I left the event I took the opportunity to ask if I could take some pictures with Andrew Over and it was truly an exiting moment. Without any hesitation, he just said okay and he quickly went to put on his new Blogger T-shirt and then took the pictures with me! He made me felt so honored!

 

Hopefully I can become a software engineer at Google one day. This event has certainly motivated me a lot to study hard and to apply for job at Google. This is awesome!

Featured in UQ Press Release - HELP University College Students Excel At UQ

Document link: http://www.scribd.com/full/49441094?access_key=key-2dkk223191xwtqr8d459

Make an Impact. Work at Facebook.

Ever since I commenced my Bachelor of IT program few years ago, I always have a dream that upon graduation I will work at one of the biggest technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and IBM. I mean isn't it cool to be able to work on something that virtually every one in the world uses on a daily basis? Though it's really difficult for an ordinary fresh grad like me to be employed by these companies. I will continue to study hard and let's see how things go in the future.