Lightning Round went nicely for me. The week after finals were over, I had six interviews over the span of four days for various people, mainly in the public sector side of things (ie. government and government-affiliated groups). However, by Tuesday, when I had four interviews, I already had a job offer from the school. Other offers trickled through, including one from the SFU library doing development on their projects, such as the Public Knowledge Project, as well as one from the Provincial Health Services Authority, associated with the province of BC, doing development in .Net.

All the offers had something interesting to offer and something to learn. For example, working with the PHSA would have given me a chance to learn C#. Working with the library would have given me valuable software development experience

But what set the school apart from the rest was simply because it gave me numerous opportunities to develop myself in areas that I know I am lacking in; namely people skills. Since the job is around 60-70% recruitment (of students), it gives me a chance to work on things like public presentations, which usually make me nervous.

It is with this mindset that made me decide on that for my co-op term. This starts on Thursday.

So to pass the time, through a referral from Marcel, I am working on a contract job for a friend of his, working on a restaurant guide website written on PHP with the Fusebox framework. It’s an interesting framework and I can’t really say too much about it yet, having only worked on it for a few days, mainly making fairly specific changes. The circuit system with fuses and all does seem quite interesting though, to say the least.

Well, looks like things would be busy.

I need to pick up my parents from the airport tonight after their trip to Las Vegas.

Tomorrow is a Scouting Centennial Celebration held by the Vancouver East Area (ie. the area which my group belongs to), so I’ll need to wake up early (just like the past few days) and help setup and oversee the booths our group is running.

Then on Sunday, we have the WCCCLC pre-camp meeting, then work, work, work, with WCCCLC over the Labour Day long weekend.

I think I’m going to be sleep deprived. Best get used to it..

This will be quite a challenge. Why?

All my experience so far with Web development is with PHP. The approaches are quite different, with the whole MVC thing Rails pushes, not to mention the fact that I will need to learn Ruby.

I just so happened to choose to do CAS integration with the system. After looking at the one page of documentation of making use of CAS, I think I know how it works, but getting it done in a language I am not familiar with is going to be a pain.

If anyone have any good sites that cater to people like me, migrating from PHP to Rails, please let me know.

Another thing as well. You know how PHP has sessions? Does Rails have anything of the sort at all? Again, let me know.