Inspiring Speeches

My girlfriend asked for some inspiration videos for her students, and I sent her these:

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (2007)

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech (2005)

Just thought that I'll share them here as well, although I guess many of you have probably already seen them.

NIS and Novell

As promised earlier, I’ll talk a bit on my experiences with the National Infocomm Scholarship (NIS) and Novell.

I first heard of NIS from my apartment mate in Beijing. He’s from NTU and we were both on attachment with Oracle at that time. He was applying for the partial scholarship (for third year undergrads) and encouraged me to do so too. Back then, I didn’t even know what a partial scholarship was. My grades weren’t that great, but I thought, hey, no harm trying. So after many tedious hours of form filling and essay writing, we both submitted our applications. Much to our surprise, we both received the good news several telephone interviews and weeks later.

After graduating from NUS in June 2007, I started work with Novell (my friend stayed on with Oracle). Initially, most of my time was spent working with the SUSE incubation team from home. It’s quite common for open-source software developers to work from home, but that's pretty unusual in Singapore.

Novell Singapore was mainly a sales office; there were technical pre-sales staff and consultants (among others), but no developers. Hence, I could work from home even though I had a desk there. I also got the chance to participate in meetings with clients and marketing events, which I found very insightful since it’s different from what I normally do. Team Singapore was a tightly-knit bunch, great fun to hang out with, and I learnt a lot from them.

Then my visa issues got sorted out and so off to Germany I went. Finally, I was able to meet everyone from the SUSE incubation team in person at our team meeting there. It's a small but global team, with people from USA, Canada, Germany, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy and Singapore (that’s me!). Everyone had different skill sets and experiences, from graphic & web designers, web developers, kernel hackers, to sales & marketing, making it a truly diverse and great team to work with.

The last month (Dec '07) of my overseas stint was one of the most memorable bits. I got to visit Novell sales managers and partners in Milan (Italy), Vienna (Austria), Rotterdam (Netherlands) and Zurich (Switzerland).

What I'm trying to share here is the same as most past guest bloggers - work experience, particularly overseas ones, are immensely fun, enriching and sometimes even life changing. Moreover, it's an invaluable and outstanding additional to your résumé. Best of all, it's often not that out of reach as some might think. Grab the opportunities that come your way, be it NOC, ATAP or whatever. You owe it to yourself to at least give it a shot!

Hey everyone! - Part 2

Time to continue my self-introduction...

I enrolled into NUS School of Computing (Computer Engineering) in 2003. Friends told me to stay on campus in a student residence as its great fun, but I didn’t since I stayed really close to campus. Looking back, I should have moved into hall anyway at least for the first semester – definitely would have made campus life more interesting. I actually did apply for it in the later years, but apparently I didn’t have enough CCA points. I was a bit of a pool fanatic so my only CCA was cue sports. Guess my walking distance address from the campus did not help either.

Along the way I did some free-lance web development (PHP, HTML/CSS, Javascript) with a number of local start-ups. In 2005, I interned for Zuji, an online travel agency. It was a great team to work with and we did some interesting load testing and performance tuning for the website. I also did some security patches for their in-house framework. We mainly worked with Oracle 10g, J2EE, Struts and some Unix scripting. Subsequently, I introduced a couple of friends to work there as well. One of them is now working for GIC while the other is with RedNano.

In 2006 I took a leave of absence from NUS to go for an attachment program with Oracle. This was just before SoC’s ATAP program was launched. Again, this was a great experience for me as I got to work in Oracle Singapore, attend courses at Oracle University for free, and perform a five month stint in Oracle’s R&D centre in Beijing. Living and working in China was both eye-opening and a lot of fun. Especially when a bottle of beer costs just S$0.30... The stint also eradicated my previous misconceptions about China in general.

Returning to NUS after that was a bit tough, particularly because I now had one less semester. I ended up with 26 MCs of modules including CS3215 and honours year project for one semester. The following and final semester was slightly better with 21 MCs. I was the teaching assistant for CS2261 (Enterprise Systems Development) and research assistant in the Software Engineering Labs. Somehow it didn’t turn out to be that bad and I survived, with the help of my friends of course. Also managed to squeeze a bit of time to help out the fantastic guys at LinuxNUS with Project Cube (a PC recycling project).

Infocomm Career Guide 2008

Those interested in a career in IT will probably find this Infocomm career guide useful.

It provides a pretty good overview of the different career paths, job descriptions and salary expectations within the industry.

Hey everyone!

As this week’s guest blogger, I feel really honored to have this opportunity to share my thoughts and experiences with the SoC community. Thanks Ruiwen and Juliana for inviting me!

Let me start with a self-introduction. I’m James Tan, currently working as a software engineer at Novell’s SUSE Labs in Germany. This is where most of the people responsible for SUSE Linux are based in, though there are many others located in sites all over the world.

Some of you may not be familiar with the SUSE Linux operating system, so let me digress for a minute to give some background. The first version of SUSE Linux started off as the German translation of Slackware Linux back in 1992. Over the years, it grew quickly to become one of the most popular Linux distributions in Europe, particularly for top supercomputers. In 2004, Novell acquired SUSE Linux. It now exists in five main flavours: openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Real Time, Desktop, and Thin Client. By the way, openSUSE 11.1 was just released recently, so do give it a shot! Too bad that I missed the release party this time round (was on vacation).

Ok enough about that, back to me now. I’m in the SUSE Incubation team and we’re currently working on SUSE Studio – a web service that makes it really quick and easy to create your own custom Linux distributions. I’ll talk more about that in a later post.

Incidentally, our team is hiring. If you’re interested, check out our jobs page for both internship and full-time positions. Alternatively you can apply through the National Infocomm Scholarship (NIS) or Enhanced Learning in Infocomm Technology (ELITe) programmes. That’s how I ended working for Novell / SUSE (through the NIS program). More on that later.

I'm not a fan of long blog posts, so I'm going to end here. Looking forward to your questions and suggestions in the comments!