Oh yes, there were a few things I forgot.
We had an interesting failure scenario once where we could not serve
all the requests coming in. Sooner or later, this will happen, for
one reason or another. So what do you do? If you try to serve all
of them anyway, you may end up overwhelming your hosts and not serve
any requests to anyone's satisfaction, particularly since people tend
to reload and thus re-submit their pending query if it is too slow.
It is handy to have a system to throttle your requests, either at the
firewall, or by serving up a low-cost page telling them to try again later.
You can also easily get into a situation where all the machines are
suffering because all the other machines are suffering, not unlike
global recessions. Hmm, an emergent properties.... food for thought.
Another interesting phenomenon is that once a user decides your service
sucks on a particular day, they're likely not to come back that day.
Another amusing case happened when our error page caused several errors
itself, so a minor problem was magnified by a factor of about five.
And I said that I would say some unconventional and shocking things,
but never quite got on the topic:
In my opinion, the education UT Austin gave me was almost worthless.
My suggestion to high-schoolers is to escape, and get a GED.
Then go to a small college.
My suggestion to UT Austin people is to take as many courses as you
can at ACC. I waited until my senior year, then kicked myself for
busting my ass at UT on bullshit courses like the legislative requirements.
If it's hard and you don't enjoy it, you won't remember any of it anyway.
Not that government and history teach you the real stuff anyway.
What they teach you has been so stripped of opinion and anything that
might offend people it's worthless. I think it turns a lot of people
off from history unnecessarily. But that's another rant.
In this job market, I would recommend not doing college, at least for
someone like me, who learns better on his own. Most of what they teach
won't help you in the real world. Some people won't give you as much
credit because you don't have the credentials, but do you really want
to work for someone like that? The only disadvantage to this is that
my friends who didn't go to college have an inferiority complex about it,
and don't promote themselves as much as they should, or ask for enough
money. I learn better when I'm pursuing an internal motivation, like
some personal project. For example, check out the guy at
http://www.microship.com and read some of his articles at Wired
(search for Behemoth). Of course, if you can swing getting credit
for what you're already doing, so much the better.
However, be aware that after your first real job, nobody cares what your
GPA was. Also, ignore the GPA requirements on those job postings;
they don't apply to people who have the initiative to learn stuff outside
of class. Everyone wants people with 3.0 or above, sure. Don't be
afraid to say you know a language if you think you can learn it the
night before the interview. Try and write some useful programs before
you apply; you can then describe to potential employers what they do
and provide the code as a sample of your work. Stick with common
languages like C, PERL, C++ so they can read them. Remember, it's just
an issue of educating them about how smart you are. If they don't
respond, call them. Send them another copy of your resume. Often
things fall through the cracks. Headhunters are useful if you don't
know who is hiring, but they mostly hire you for big, sucky companies
like Motorola and IBM.
I had a lot of fun in Novak's compiler course.
Steer clear of the one-hour language courses; the C++ class I took
took more time than all other 12 hours I had combined.
Paul Wilson is almost the only prof over there doing really practical
stuff; I did my undergrad research project for him. It was fun.
I guess that's about the extent of my scholastic assertions.
For a list of companies in town, go to the City of Austin
web site and check out the Chamber of Commerce section.
You can also look at the venture capitalists pages (e.g.
austinventures.com), and of course search tx.jobs on Deja News.
Don't forget to adjust for cost of living at non-Austin places.
You can find that out in a variety of places.
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