Renaud Bourassa » Personal

The World Changes

Rhino — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:28:58 +0000

Have you ever been obsessed by a question? One of these existential interrogation that continuously stays in your head and that you can’t get rid of without answering it? Well last week, I had such an interrogation. For the whole week I kept wondering what would happens if a T. Rex fell. With its short arms, it would probably hurt itself badly, wouldn’t it? Well, after watching the whole Jurrasic Park trilogy, I realized that my interrogation was totally pointless. Why? Because there is a larger dinosaur than the T. Rex called the Spinosaurus. This new information totally changed my world.

Talking about changes, you probably noticed that I changed the design of my website. I wasn’t happy with the color scheme anymore so I changed to something lighter. Again, I am not a photoshop pro so I kept it simple with a minimalist look. It should also be easier to browse. The rest of the website should follow soon. I am still working on bits of the wordpress template, but as soon as I am happy with the result, I will start working on the other parts of the website.

On another note, I finished my first year at the university of Waterloo. I am going back home tomorrow for my first work term. I will work as a software developer for Artificial Mind and Movement, an independent video game studio in downtown Montreal. It should be great. I will be part of the Wii/PS2 engine team, so I should do more technical work than what I am used to. I hope I will learn a lot. It also means a change of language. I will get to practice my C++ a bit more. As I like to think: there is nothing like practical work to learn a new language. I hope I am not wrong…

Back in Black (and Yellow)

Rhino — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:21:56 +0000

After what is my shortest Christmas Holiday for the last three years, I am back in Waterloo. During these two weeks, I took a break from everything I was working on and spent most of my time with my friends and family. The little spare time I got went into Project Euler problems. I managed to solve the first 25 using C and will probably post my code in the days to come.

I also received my marks for my first term and I have to say that I am pretty happy with what I got. This term is more focused on computer science related subjects with courses such as Functional Programming and Data Abstraction (using Scheme and C++) and Digital Circuits and Systems. I also have two economy classes which is something I enjoy a lot. It is also the beginning of the hiring process for this summer co-op term.

And, as of right now, I am reading books on ruby and ruby on rails to improve my skills. I did a lot of small scripts and projects using this language/framework, but the MVC concept is still new to me. I am now looking at creating a complete, usable web application so I need to expand my knowledge a bit more. Stay tuned for more.

Little Update

Rhino — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:52:15 +0000

I haven’t posted for a while so here is a little update on what is going on with me. I’m still troubleshooting my portfolio, searching for bugs and correcting them. There was some problem with the CSS on certain browsers, especially IE. University is taking most of my time. The assignments get longer and harder so I have less free time to do extra work. The Lego Robot Project of my Software Engineering 101 is due for next week so I’m spending more time in the lab.

Also, last thursday was the Engineering Student Awards Dinner. As an entrance scolarship recipient I was invited with some 400 other engineering students. At my table was sitting Gaurav Jain, who graduated from software engineering last year and is now the VP of Polar Mobile, a young and quite successful company developing a smartphone publishing tool. I had the occasion to talk a bit with him about how he started the company and how he is managing it. He is a pretty brilliant guy and his company looks really promising.

I’m not working on a particular project. I discovered Project Euler and spent some time doing the first 10 challenges in C. I’m currently learning Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework via tutorials. I have an idea in mind for a future project that would fit perfectly with Rails but I’m not proficient enough right now to do anything effective. But I’m a quick learner so stay tuned!