Here is a follow up to my previous post with another talk by Gerald Jay Sussman at the University of Waterloo. This time it is on propagators, an interesting architecture pattern inspired by electronic circuits. Enjoy!

I am back on campus in Waterloo, which means the talk season is now open again. The first talk I attended this term is a public lecture by Gerald Jay Sussman, the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT. He gave a pretty interesting presentation on how programming provides us with a set of tools to express ourselves. Here is the video.

It has been a while since I posted anything here. I started working at Facebook in Palo Alto last week. I have to admit it is pretty different from my previous work term. First, the working hours are way different from what I’m used to. I have to reconsider my definition of being late and leaving late. One good thing is that there are a lot of smart people working there and some unbelievably interesting projects. You can’t get a better work environment when it comes to motivation. I have to say the free food is also pretty good. The company is also really open with its employees, holding regular talks where everybody is invited to discuss issues and new projects.

For those interested in getting a job there, here are a couple of tips I learned from my interviews. First, do stuff on you own. Everybody does the school projects, that doesn’t make you special. Don’t go over the “reverse a linked list” or “how do I find anagrams” algorithms before your interview, you would be losing your times. They come up with unusual questions that are not too hard, but that require some knowledge of basic algorithm concepts (e.g. dynamic programming) and that test your problem solving skills, not your memory. If your want to train for these, Project Euler is a good place to start. Also, make sure to visit their programming puzzles page.

Last week I assisted to a tech talk by a Senior Hardware Engineer for the Zune team at Microsoft Entertainment & Devices. He went over a number of subjects, ranging from cloud computing to handheld devices. A pretty good talk overall and a good look at what might come in the future at Microsoft. I managed to film everything, but not from the best angle.

Last Friday, Yahoo! was back at the University of Waterloo for Hack U 2009. After a week of talks by web gurus, such as Rasmus Lerdorf and Douglas Crockford, came the 24 hours hack event. This year, we decided to do something useful and in this tough economic time, we ended up creating a mashup to follow job trends across the United States. We scraped all the data we could from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, making it possible to search for statistics and open positions relevant to a certain type of job. We then display the result on a map using different metrics such as the average salary or the number of workers.

The result is called JobU and can be found here: http://renaudbourassa.com/projects/jobu/.

We won 4th place (when really, we should have won at least 3rd). The first place went to Docuvine, a really interesting web application that mimics Google Wave. Here are some picture of the event.

For more pictures of the event, see Rasmus Lerdorf or Jamie Lockwood flickr photostream.