Alicia Sykes's Blog

For the last 12 months I have been doing some part time work for the new University Technology College (UTC) in Swindon. Which is due to open this September with 300 pupils joining in year 10, and another 300 joining next year in year 11.

My role as a website administrator was mainly just maintaining the website, including adding and modifying new pages and posts and working with the college's recruiters, principle, board members, and others. The role was not challenging, although a lot of work, and important not to make mistakes as the website served as the primary method to recruit the new students and staff.

Everyone working

Since starting here 3 weeks ago I have completed an internal Java training program, which included 2 weeks of seminars outlining the key principles of the Java programming language and how we will apply these principles to create enterprise applications for a variety of platforms. The final week we were tasked to create a festival booking system for a hypothetical town. This included a Java based backend and JSP, and SQL, as well as a HTML, CSS and JavaScript front end.

Afternoon break

The teaching and resources provided throughout the course was very good, and we were always given the opportunity to expand our knowledge, or ask for help.

Also since there was 30 of us on the course we were able to get together in the evenings for some social events, drinks and meals around London after work. This gave us the opportunity to get to know each other better and discuss what we had learnt in the past few days.

Whole group photo

Our team (Ben, George, me, Venetta, Ollie)

Drinks after work and after the last day:

Evening after last training

I have just completed my first two days work for Accenture as an associate software engineer. It was a VERY new experience, as I've never worked for a company anywhere near that size, and I had no idea what to expect. Despite that so far I have enjoyed pretty much every moment of it.

The first two days were induction days, there were 40 interns in our intake, which meant there were plenty of people all in the same situation, all the staff were friendly, and clearly amazing people.

For the next few weeks we will be doing Java training, and then we'll be assigned to a project and start working! I am really excited for the coming weeks, to continue learning new skills, meeting great people, and gain experience.

Drinks after our first day

Me - after first day

For the last few terms I have been helping out at an extra-curricular raspberry pi programming club for 13-15 year old's at the Oxford Academy in Blackbird Leys. It had been great to have seen and helped the kids progress from knowing virtually nothing about programming to being able to write fully functional programs.

In the end everyone worked together to program raspberry pi's to play the xylophone. The xylophone itself was built by kinds in the schools DT department, and the music that is played was composed by the music department. I wrote the program to convert the music written by an electronic keyboard into a multidimensional Python array in a text file, and the members of the club wrote everything else.

It was on display at the Ashmoleans Live Friday event on the 14th of March
(which unfortunately I couldn't attend due to another commitment)

Here's the link to the Raspbery Pi clubs page     

Robothespian is the latest new arrival to the CCT department at Oxford Brookes.

I want to see him a few weeks ago when he was brand new, here's a video of him sinning in the rain!

It did come as a surprise while I was eating my breakfast in front of BBC news at about 7:15 to see the head of the computing department, Nigel Crook and robothespian on the telly. Here's the playback:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26512171

I created a website a few months ago to allow people to find me online, view my work and contact me. This afternoon I though I'd update the homepage a bit and de-clutter it.

You can view it by clicking here

The Brand New Revision Quizzes

The old version of Revision Quizzes

So while I was at college I made a web app for the teachers and pupils to set and complete quizzes and tests. It was the first bit of programming I'd done, so it wasn't amazingly written, but it did take off pretty well, and so I think there's potential for an application like this to do well. That's why I decided to remake it, from scratch, with the aim of making it work SEAMLESSLY!

You can view the original version of Revision Quizzes here - see why I'm remaking it now?!

Okay now for the new version.
The new version will have 6 main pages:
- Homepage - with built in browse and search functions using AJAX
- Start quiz page - displays after you've clicked a quiz but before you've seen the first question
- Quiz page - the actual questions - they mark themselves instantly using AJAX and you can see how many people chose the same answer as you strait away. If there is additional details, images, media or an answer explanation, these will be displayed accordingly.
- The results page - displayed when the quiz is complete. Shows you your score, time and all the important stuff. But it also lets you compare how you did against the averages for this quiz, there's a high score leader board and a rating system as well as social sharing options.
- Create a quiz page - I haven't got this far yet, but yeah I know, it's kind of crucial
- Users page- again haven't done this, but it will have some user management stuff and leader boards. Note:  users won't have to sign in or anything just to do quizzes.

So far I've done 80% of the homepage just got to make the search better, and pretty much finished the quiz pages, but haven't yet started the create quiz page or user page.

Click here to check it out,

Let me know what you think below, I'm open to suggestions.

So today I caught the Oxford Tube at 0630, to spend the day working for a company that sets up and maintains networks in some of the trading firms in Mayfair London. There had been a big changeover of hardware over the weekend, which had caused problems,  and the firm contracted to fix this didn't have enough staff to fix something on that scale while casing minimum inconvenience to clients.
Got to say, I learnt quite a lot about how all the network stuff I've read about is actually used in real world and large scale systems. Also really enjoyed seeing all the fancy Mayfair London offices, and not to mention getting a days pay ;)

I have finished a 3 month temporary contract working for the University of Oxford on a project called WWARN, which is the World Wide Antimalarial Research Network, they are a Bill and Malinder Gates funded project, which provides high-quality data resources along with customised research tools as well as a global platform for exchanging scientific and public health information on malaria drug resistance.

I was programming in Java, and my job involved a LOT of data! I was mainly focused on writing a module of a program to calculate the mili-gram of effective active ingredient per kilogram or patient body weight - sounds easy? Think again. There were literally millions of records spread across about 10 different databases, all with different available data, in completely different formats, and some of it (most of it) was incredibly messy - I'm talking 16 layers of nesting in an XML database, and dates written sometimes in words!

Anyway, I learnt a lot, defiantly more that I've learnt at university so far, and I hope I contributed something positive to such a good cause.