LiamKaufman

Software Companies in Canada are Now Easier to Find!

The merit of a traditional computer science degree at a university is often debated on programming forums and it is generally agreed that experience is extremely important. While that is true, many companies now explicitly choose to hire those with degrees. This presents a conundrum, if I spend all my time studying and mastering my classes, how do I build experience? Schools like Waterloo offer a Co-op program, while U of T offers a one year "Professional Experience Year". However, I'm in my 9th year of school and prospect of stretching it further seems a bit much. This leaves me with the option of acquiring experience on my own. This search for experience has lead me to many jobs sites to peruse what hiring companies are looking for. What technologies are these companies expecting their candidates to possess, how many years of experience with that technology are they looking for? I quickly found that many large job sites only have a subset of the actual jobs open jobs in Canada. On popular job boards in the states only 1 or 2 for every 40 are based in Canada. This lead me to start searching for software companies in Canada. On finding a software company, with offices in Canada I quickly found that many were looking to hire.

Introducing AppMakers.ca

Given the hurtles I had to jump through to find these companies I figure a perfect opportunity presented itself: create a directy of software companies with office(s) in canada. After a few weeks of toiling away I created AppMakers.ca. The goal of AppMakers.ca is to highlight software companies with offices in Canada and make it really easy to filter companies by province, city and even the technologies they use. The site is still beta and we're hoping to add more features over the next few months, in the mean time I need to get back to studying!

Custom Domain Name with Heroku and Godaddy

You have your site at Heroku setup and you'd like to add your domain name that you have registered at Godaddy. Follow these steps:

1. Verify your Heroku account: Heroku > Account > Verify Billing info
2. Enable custom add on; done through the terminal in your application's root directory:

    heroku addons:add custom_domains
   

3. Follow the steps here: onticoren.com/2009/06/29/go-daddy-dns-heroku/.
4. In your Heroku account add the custom domain entered in the previous step.

Java, SwingWorker, NetBeans and Mac OS X leopard!

I turns out NetBeans 6.5 on my Mac (running Leopard) uses Java 1.5, not 1.6 which is necessary for SwingWorker. To get Netbeans using Java 1.6:
Tools => Java Platforms => Add Platform. A new window should appear. Select the Java Standard Edition and 1.6 should be here: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home . Then click next!
To enable 1.6 within your project right click on the project and select "Set Configuration". Select Libraries, and at the top of the window it should say: "Java Platform: JDK 1.5" click on the JDK 1.5 part and you should be able to select 1.6.

pyItunes, a Python Itunes Library Parser

I believe every personal website needs some flair that personifies the website's owner. The first way I plan on achieving this is by providing a list of some of my favorite songs. Figuring out which songs I like is trivial as I've been raiting all the songs I listen to on Itunes. Since I'm still in the early phase of learning to program I figured this would be an easy opportunity to role my own Itunes library parser. As a result I created a python module, which I called pyItunes. pyItunes includes three classes that can parse the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file and convert it into list of Song objects. I decided to roll my own micro-xml parser that can only parse the iTunes xml file. Although, reinventing the wheel, especially an XML parser, is likely a horrible idea I felt it would be a good learning experience. In future versions I may swap an existing XML parser that is much faster and more efficient than the one I created.

My music page

Download pyItunes:

download via git:
or go to github and click download.

pyItunes Usage:

First Post

It almost seems like a necessity to have a personal website these days. After a little toiling and much fun I created a simple blog engine using Google's App Engine. The simplicity of the site was a perfect starter project for broadening my software design horizons and getting more experience with Python and the App Engine.

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