Much has happened in the last a-hair-under-two-months, and so I’m mostly writing this to unwind the ol’ stack.

First off: My first ever job interview was about a month ago. This is not, in itself, a particularly significant event. The significant part is that it was with Jump Trading, a fairly well-respected quantitative finance shop: apparently they found my LinkedIn profile, and liked it! I never had to apply to this position. Ironically I’ve never gotten an interview from a position I actually applied to: I start to doubt that applications are real at all.

I (embarrassingly enough) did not ask for the name of the first engineer I interviewed with. Apparently they actually read my personal website(!) and this blog (!!) so, if you’re an engineer at Jump who had a fairly memorable interview with a gatech kid in September, thanks again for meeting with me!

It was over Zoom. One would expect that I’d have gotten their name from Zoom: no such luck, it was a conference room Zoom with the name “Fearless Leader” and nothing else. There’s actually a really funny reason for that but I was under NDA when I found out, so… I promise it’s totally worth interviewing with them, even if all you get is an explanation for their naming conventions.

Before the interview I bought a copy of How Linux Works. This was a good choice. I learned quite a bit from it, and indeed only knew the answers to several questions because of it! Apparently being a fast reader really is an ass-save.

This interview was heavily luck-based; my technical skills are plenty sharp, of course, but what sold them was a quip about learning Linux from “a wandering tech shaman”. That was completely true. I actually did learn Linux from a wandering tech shaman and he actually did mysteriously disappear once I knew enough to go on without him. I did not expect that to go over as well as it did, but within 24 hours I got an email saying they wanted to fly me to their office to do a second round interview.

I’m pretty young. Not, of course, young enough to be surprising to them, but sufficiently young that I’d never been on a plane before, never been to a big city apart from Atlanta before, and never had a job interview before. There were a lot of firsts.

They scheduled for a little over a week out – that’s not much. Regardless I bought about a cubic foot worth of technical literature ranging from “pretty advanced” to “graduate level textbook”. I got through most of Fluent Python but barely even started OSTEP, Systems Performance, and DDIA, and I never even opened Linux Network Internals. Trying to read all of that in eight days may have been a bit too ambitious.

(That said, I now know enough python to scare the shit out of professional python programmers, so there’s that!)

Flying was fun! I’ve heard nasty things about commercial air travel but it wasn’t too bad. I’ll admit I freaked out a little bit when I had to confront my deep-seated unknown-known that planes do not work. The plane worked! Twice, even!

Uber from the airport was absolutely insane; it took over an hour to get into the city. The driver was Russian, which was cool; we exchanged a few words but I really don’t know enough Russian to hold a conversation. That said: CHICAGO WOOOOO! The city was super nice. I expected it to be bleak but, aside from having no hills, it was a beautiful city. Coming from the southeast where it is pretty damn near impossible to see more than a few hundred meters in any direction what for all the hills: being able to look at the horizon is cool. Also apparently their streets have lots of trees! In Atlanta we pretty much always have a tree within view, so it was nice not to be in total isolation from the forest.

The hotel I stayed in had a pillow menu. Like, an actual menu with the names of pillows you could have brought to you. I didn’t get one but I have a sneaking suspicion they were all the same pillow with slightly different names. I still occasionally start giggling about this.

Interviews started “early” the next morning (around 9:00). I can’t say much about this part but, Fluent Python helped.

And then I flew back home!

Earlier today, I got the call from a recruiter saying I did not get the position. That’s okay. I don’t regret it; meeting the team was really cool and I’m incredibly flattered that they considered me cool enough to talk to me at all.

That, in itself, is not sufficiently hectic to merit a blog post: events come in fucking packs.

The week after my interview, it was exams. The week before that, (see: less than 24 hours before my interview), I had a lab in digital design. For this lab, we had to use a crappy crappy awful stupid piece of hardware called the “MyDaq”. In fact the name alone shouldn’t strike alarm bells; the alarm bells were fully struck for me one word immediately previous: “NI”. Yep. These things were made by NI.

I’ve had a beef with NI since I was literally thirteen.

Like, it should not be the case that this company makes hardware so bad a thirteen-year-old notices it, but they do. The feud started with the RoboRio, a product decades before its time in the since that it cost\ ten times more than microcontrollers with ten times the processing power when it was released. What is the justification for this? I legitimately can’t tell. The processor isn’t anything special. It supports a CAN bus, it supports i2c, it supports SPI, it has PWM output ports. Guess what else does this, and did do this well before the RoboRio was released? A FUCKING RASPBERRY PI. FRC has, as I hear it, moved to the fucking raspberry pi, because even they realized how awful the roborio is.

Anyways.

Having terrorized me in my FRC years, now NI was back to make my life miserable again. Consider the MyDaq. I never actually got my hands on one, because the gatech library was miserably undersupplied for the volume of students – something like a third of the class couldn’t obtain one. I saw from my tablemates, however, that it’s basically an array of digital pins controlled over a USB UART.

The software bricked a bunch of people’s computers.

Being a strict nonconformist and pretty good with Arduino Unos, I just built my own fucking daq in the middle of class. Credit to the professor and TAs – they took it completely in stride.

It occurred to me while I was rebuilding the damn thing in a Chicago hotel room (the professor needed a video, and I didn’t have time to take one before my flight) that my life would be a lot simpler if I generalized: that is, programmed the Uno to take commands from some nice GUI software so I could do digital prototyping without jury rigging. Thus was born from my vengeance CircuitDojo. The idea is to make an AVR-based, fully open source DAQ that can run on the arduino uno lying around your desk. I’m actually pretty close to full digital functionality! Eventually I wanna support pullups, PWM, and analog pins, but those will be v2. With any luck the professor will officially recognize CircuitDojo on the next lab.

There will be more posts about this.

Anyways.

A few days ago, I got a message from an old friend saying that, basically, the defense startup she’s working at needs a decent software engineer and my name came up.

The company is very small and informal so the process was pretty simple, and now I’m contracting with them! And we have to ship completely novel weaponry on a serious big boy defense contractor level! In less than a year! It’s gonna be crazy but I’m pretty confident we’ll pull it off. Greater miracles, less time, the works.

It’s not the big shift I was hoping for. Going to Chicago for an internship, and then hopefully working there full-time after graduation, would have been pretty much the best thing that could happen. But sometimes reality ain’t the best way it could be, and the only thing for it is to keep moving forwards. I still get to build cool stuff and work with cool people. Discrete math sucks and the MyDaq is terrible and this university is awesome and I still wear a balloon hat to all my exams and maybe someday if I’m super annoying there’ll be a course on Rustlang.

Tonight I have to go on call with a defense contractor. And attend a Cory Doctorow talk. And finish introductory Java homework (and hopefully, if I have time, write some code hundreds of times more complicatedinteresting than anything in this course). But right now I’m just looking out my window. The leaves are still green, mostly, but red tinges are appearing. The wind is cold, perhaps not unseasonably so, but it’s still shocking. The sun frames the trees; soon it will set, and leave little more than the soft blue radiance that defines an autumn dusk. Hills roll into the distance, but I can’t see them from here. There are too many trees.