And Then There Was Alastair

• What are your greatest strengths related to this position?

I believe my biggest strength is having a real passion for technology and that it can bring real benefits to business and people. I believe that my detailed orientated character lends itself well for problem solving. I also have experience of a pressured work environment where the network and server uptime had a direct relationship with the work people could do and the client delivery times. A big part of that experience is coping with the responsibility of something going wrong being my fault. I think I can offer you a person who takes pride in his work, seeks to do things well, and endeavours to do better when confronting problems.

• What related courses have you taken?

The most relevant course I took at university was called “Distributed Computation and Networks” gave me experience at configuring various networks of routers running unix and then running analysis on the network performance.

I also became more familiar with programming after I taking a few courses about Software Engineering such as Software Eng Methods, Advance Software Eng, Language Processing, and Multi-Agent System, where I learnt Assembly, Java, C++, Object Orientation, Pascal, and Prolog.

I studied electronics and computers architecture, which gives me a good grounding in how computers work, which will help any problem solving I’ll need to do.

• Why do you want to be a ….?

The reason I choose …… as my first choice was because I feel that my previous work experience and natural inclinations towards taking computers apart, making new ones, and general interest of web tech, servers etc gave me the best chance at being accepted onto the graduate program at …….

The fact is that I love this part of computing. Few people it seems think about the incredible feat of technology that goes on behind making websites and company file servers reliable and always available, no matter the demand. People are annoyed when their personal computer crashes, but they understand that that’s just part of life. However they hold a double standard, they just expect the network to work, websites to be on, file systems that don’t crash, access controls that work. I like to see how ingenious the systems are at being redundant, from the hardware having multiple power supplies, UPS, raid with some even having redundant motherboards, to the software engineering challenges of load balancing, distributed databases, the night mare of cross platform authentication and privacy controls. Some of the IBM mainframes are just awesome, I was reading the specs of one and it included the ability to automatically identify broken CPUs, isolate it from running, and send a support request for an engineer to come out from IBM to replace it, which could be done as a hot swap, so it didn’t even need to be turned off. Incredible.