Getting started

Hi there!

This is my first blog post ever, and I'll use to to introduce myself and talk a bit about what I plan to write about and why. Unfortunately, it will probably be a bit dry, but I have to start somewhere :)

I'm a 24 year old Research Assistant and PhD student at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Zagreb, Croatia in the Computer Science department. I graduated about a year ago and shared the "student of the generation" award with another colleague in the CS department. During college, I took part in several software projects, most notably in the design and implementation of a SmartHome system for Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2007, and in the Ericsson Nikola Tesla (the Croatian branch of Ericsson) Summer Camp 2007 where I helped implement a two way SIP/SOAP gateway for general purpose SIP/SOAP integration (primarily to enable SIP-aware mobile devices to consume Web Services on the Internet).

Just before graduation, I took part in a 3-month internship at Google HQ in Mountain View, CA where I worked in the OpenSocial group. If you're not familiar with OpenSocial, it's basically a social networking platform backed and developed by Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, hi5 and a bunch of other social network sites (pretty much anyone that's not Facebook). My time at Google was probably one of the best times in my life. The work experience there is really nothing like anything I've had a chance to experience before (or since).

I try to keep my interests broad, but if I had to choose just a few (professional ones), it would have to be distributed systems, Web technologies, algorithm design and analysis, discrete math, programming languages and compilers, and complexity theory (still pretty broad :). Most of these coincide really well with the University classes I'm a TA on. I currently work on the Geppeto project in the Consumer Computing Lab at my University. Geppeto is basically a Gadget composition tool designed for consumers (i.e. people with no specialist knowledge about computer programming and Web technologies). If you're using iGoogle and Firefox 3, you can install the current version of Geppeto and see what it's all about.

When I'm not working, I enyoj solving algorithmic problems on sites like TopCoder. Unfortunately, I rarely get a chance to compete in online events, but they give access to all the problems and automatic testing of solutions after each contest. The community is also really awesome, and all the problems get editorials that discuss how the problem can be solved which can be helpful if you get stuck.

So, after covering the boring bits, I'll set out the plan for this blog. Basically, I'll try to release code snippets for doing various useful stuff (Vim scripts, algorithm/data structure implementations, WoW addons etc.). I also plan to do pretty regular book reviews on the relevant CS/programming/math book I've read. Finding good reviews online is hard, and I feel they can really be useful since buying and reading a bad book is a big waste of time. Finally, I'll write about all sorts of stuff I stumble upon that might be interesting.

That's it for my first post! Take care :)