CS 371p Fall 2020 Jonathan Granier
3 min readOct 5, 2020
- What did you do this past week? I’ve been working on recruitment and networking with family-friends and parents old co-workers trying to make sure I’m not without a job since people keep saying it’s harder to find one this year.
- What’s in your way? I’m having a difficult time balancing my schoolwork, interning, and recruiting. I believe I’m getting a full-time offer from my internship on Tuesday, but it’s up in the air. My manager wasn’t given headcount at first, but she has been working up some sort of plan that she said she can’t fill me in on until Tuesday. She got approval of her plan from the three managers above her, and now she’s having a final conversation with HR that will decide if it’s a yes or no. I’m feeling optimistic since she got approval from all the hiring committees, but uncertain because she hasn’t been able to fill me in on any specific details yet. It would be nice because if the offer is good, I won’t have to recruit anymore, and my final semester at UT will be a breeze.
- What will you do next week? I’m only taking three classes, but two of them have the first test in the next 1–1.5 weeks. It’s time to go into study mode and focus on doing well on the tests.
- If you read it, what did you think of Why is Sillicon Valley So Awful to Women? I have not read it at this point.
- What was your experience of arrays, equal(), and iterators (this question will vary, week to week) I actually found most of these topics quite interesting. It’s nice knowing how arrays work so that we better understand vectors which seem to be the standard in C++ and equal’s templating was the most interesting piece of the lecture. I took SWE last semester, and iterator concepts seem pretty standard across languages, so there wasn’t much to takeaway on this topic.
- What made you happy this week? I have had a lot of positive feedback after the career fair. I’m graduating in December, so finding a job is extremely important to me right now. I’m in the recruitment process with about 15 companies at the moment, and they keep coming. Was super excited because 4 of them are actually interviewing me for non-entry-level positions given my two straight years of internship experience.
- What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? The Go programming language is amazing. I highly recommend learning it. I’m rewriting a bottlenecked component in Go for my internship right now because we have it in Ruby running linearly, and there are 1–2 second SQL connections that only allow us to schedule ~50k items per day. We really need that number up to at least 1 million per day. Go has this really cool concept of goroutines which are most comparable to threads but are much more efficient. I have this design using Go channels that will schedule asynchronously, and we could essentially spawn up tens of thousands of goroutines that are waiting on this channel that is almost like a queueing system. The goroutines are blocked until data is passed into this channel, so they sit around waiting for work consuming no CPU, and only 2kb of memory. It’s a really cool design that would only be possible in Go due to the way Linux handles threads.