TY Work Experience at Red Hat

My Name is T-Jay Flanagan. I am a transition year student at Ardscoil Na Mara, Tramore. — Monday - I am at Red Hat for work experience this week. I am really enjoying it so far and I find it so interesting to see the type of work they do here. I have met many new people who are also attending the work experience this week.All the students and staff members are very friendly here. The Mario Kart tournament we played today was also really fun. I am looking forward to the rest of my week at Red Hat. — Tuesday - It is my second day at red Hat. I really enjoyed today and I learned many new interesting things. we started off the day with our daily stand-up and we listened to everyones thoughts and opinions from yesterday.The first thing we learned about was Github and how to use it. It is very useful as it is what I’m using to write this blog right now. We then had a short break and came back to learn about Python. I found this really interesting and I think it is very useful as it makes coding much easier and more simple, especially for beginners. We used python coding today and experimented a bit with it. We even made our own rock, paper, scissors game. The last thing we did today was look into “Crack a million passwords” and we looked into how passwords can be cracked and even leaked by changing the password with the hash function, which I find a bit crazy. — Wednesday - It is my third day at Red Hat. To start of the day, we have done our daily stand-up. From looking at our plan of the day on the whiteboard, the first thing we have today is a talk on the history of computing, which I must say I’m intrigued about. I’d say it will be great to learn about. After this, we are then going to be looking at Bash/Command Line which I am actully not too familiar with yet, so that should be enjoyable and I will give my best attempt at it. After, we will be discussing Student Life which may look into what it would potentially be like to study in the computer or software engineering field. We may get to hear about the personal experiences of those who have already went to college and studied in this sector. The last thing we are doing today is an enginnering task which I am really looking forward to as I really enjoy engineering and I did engineering for Junior Cert, so hopefully my skills I have picked up may come in handy for this task.

After our day and all the activities, I really enjoyed everything we did. I found the History of computing presentation by James really interesting and I enjoyed learning about it. Bash was also great and fun to try to get the hang of it. I also enjoyed the conversations we had as a group about student life, different jobs and roles in this specific field and we heard the staffs personal experiences also. One of my favourite things today was the rollercoasters built with paper straws we made in teams. We had a great time building them and our rollercoaster actually turned out alright and just barely worked when we rolled the ball down it.

Thursday- We have just finished our daily stand-up and we are going to be going for breakfast at 10, which I am really looking forward to. after breakfast we are going to be given a presentation on AI and I’m curious about what we will talk about. After our action packed day, we have looked into many things such as helping AI identify coral. We then did presentations on Rain Gardens in pairs. I was with Brian. — Friday- We started off our last day with our usual stand-up and it was great to hear everyones thoughts. we then went to one of the different rooms and we were shown a Raspberry Pi by Shaun. The main event of the day is the coding on the micro-bits and racing our cars with our codes on them. It is a great way to finish off our very fun week.