#!SUITS Camp Day 2

Day 2 of the #!SUITS Camp was a full day of visiting real live workplaces. These of course includes our major sponsor Optiver, whom we visited first and foremost. This was followed by Atlassian, who kindly hosted a BBQ lunch as well. To finish off the day of adventures, we visited the Sydney office for Google here in Australia.

Many thanks goes to Cassie, Mellanie, Michael and Charles from Optiver; Brydie, Matt, Soren, Matt and Nick from Atlassian; and also Will, Michael, Jules, Narelle, David and Aviv from Google for their time today sharing a little insight into their respective companies, as well as guiding us around the wonderfully crafted offices.

If I’ve missed anyone (out of so many today), just ping me in the comments. I want to make sure that I have included everyone whom has made today a wonder reality.

Stay tuned for some photos — hopefully!

#!SUITS Camp starts today

The #!SUITSCamp is all about dedicating a time to work on a special interest project. Today it kicks off with a grand total of 25 participants including those staying residential and those otherwise.

It is a time to get away from everything else, and focus on just those projects that has always been at the back of the mind, wanting to be done but never had the opportunity. Now is the chance.

The projects can be done individually or in groups, and ranges from writing applications (and games) for the mobile platform, a virtual art easel, to the next generation brain ransacking game that involves space travel and juggling with time as your biggest enemy.

SUITS Seminar

Thursday 15 May marks the day for yet another #!SUITS seminar. Just an overview, the Sydney University IT Society have been running these seminars ever since the society is formed. Recently, we have changed the format so that during the hour, we have two guest speakers.

Today, our first speaker is Meitar Mozcovitz, who is a passionate web developer. Yes, a REAL web developer who actually cares about users and other developers. That’s why he came and chatted to us about a good way to make documentation useful.

I’m trying to get hold of his presentation, and once I do, they’ll be put up onto the #!SUITS tutorials page.

The second speaker was Prof. Jon Patrick, from our very own School of IT at University of Sydney. His talk was about how natural language processing techniques can be used to solve headaches around inconsistent medical terminology used everywhere. As part of his research, an intelligent system with was created that could interpret thousands of notes and messages, even ones using funny medical symbols and terminology, and produce a formally structured report using standard terminology. Sounds good? Well it’s even more so since it’s pluggable to any existing system without major changes. Ah, the possibilities..

Random code snippet

I just happened to dig up a piece of code from little while ago. This was collaboratively produced in one of the ACM Programming Training events at SUITS. It is designed to remove all duplicate integers from an array. This method has a time complexity of O(nlogn), and memory O(1). Unfortunately, we haven’t tested or compiled it yet…

#include <stdlib.h>
void blah(int *nums, int*size)
{
    int *a, *b;
    qsort((void *)nums, *size, sizeof(int), &cmp);
    for (a = nums + 1, b = nums; a < (nums + *size); a++)
    {
        for (; *a == *b; a++);
        b++;
        *b = *a;
    }
    *size = (b - nums) + 1;
}

int cmp(const void *a; const void *b)
{
    int a, b;
    a = *(int *) a;
    b = *(int *) b;
    return (a == b) ? 0 : ((a < b) ? -1 : 1);
}