Keelan McCormack Blog
Monday
Day 1 at Red hat was a great time to get to know what we would be doing in the week and getting to know what type of people we would be working with. At 10 am we mainly played around by guessing the famous person on our back, I took the longest due to not knowing and watching the Star Wars series. (I was Luke Skywalker)
After that we went on a little tour of the office where we got to see the kitchen, lounge, pool room and other offices at around 11 am before heading to the main work room during the afternoon where we learned about the type of work that went on in here and learned how the people here worked with their customers by being agile, which follows a method of design, devolop, test, release, feedback and plan then rinse and repeat.
Then myself and the others went on our break to have a small Mariokart tournament which helped us bond more so we could work better. Then after that we went back into the main office to do a small example of what coding could be like with customers with Mr. Potato heads in which we were paired up and had to dress/style our potato heads in order to satisfy our customers needs in which we used the To do, do and done strategy and after that we did a reflection exercise of what went well, what didn’t go well and what we could improve upon if we were to do this again.
Overall, I would say that this was a great first day that helped me learn what we would be getting up to during this week as well as meeting new people and getting to know them in a fun and silly way. If there was one critique that I could make, it would be that we didn’t do too much work but since this was our first day, I can see why we did so little and it also helped me bond with the people I would be working with.
Tuesday
Today at Red hat we were a lot more busy than we were on monday. Unfortunetly, I had an appointment today so I wasn’t able to come in at 9:30am and had to arrive at around 12pm but thankfully I was still able to come in and catch up. When I arrived we were typing out what we did on monday which can be seen above and after a bit of time I was able to catch up and finish my monday report.
Later on in the afternoon after lunch we had two collage students from S.E.T.U. come in and tell us about the collage expierence. This was very helpful as I plan to go into S.E.T.U. and it let me know what I was in for when I pass my leaving cert exams in which I hope to get a career in computering in the future.
I also learned about the wide variety of courses you can partake in when you get to collage and how it can help you get into a wide variety of jobs just like red hat. We also learned that a lot of women don’t partake in this type of job which other IT and computuring companies hope to increase.
Overall, I had a great second day here at Red Hat and thankfully I will be able to partake in many other lectures and talks tomorrow and during the rest of the week. I’d say that I’m looking forward to the following days of work expierence here.
Wednesday
Day 3 at Red hat was mainly focused arounf engineering and teamwork. at 10am we had started our blogs a little early just to get ahead. Then we had a small meeting about both the importance of teamwork at around 11am which taught us what type of trust and relience you need to work with others in an efficent manner and a small bit of history in engineering.
At around 12pm we had a funny challenge of making a structure out of dry spaghetti and attach a marshmallow ontop and made sure it didn’t fall. While we didn’t win, it was still a lot of fun.
After lunch we were tasked to, within two hours, make a rollercoaster for a ball with a 360 degrees loop and after s long while, my team and I had completed it and had won the competition which we then decided to put it on display in the canteen.
Overall, today was great fun and helped us have fun while teaching us about what it means to work on an idea in a team.
Thursday
Day 4 at red hat was an A.I based day in which we took part in presentations and learned how an A.I works due to its coding.
At 10:45am we learned about the specfic types of A.I those being: 1. Artificial narrow intelligence, which is something used for small knowledge. 2. Artificial general intelligence which is for more general knowledge and 3. Artificial super intelligence which is for precise and direct knowledge
We also used A.I websites to write a slideshow on rain gardens in which we used chatgpt to help us and overall it was quite fun and a little silly sometimes with the answers we got.
I had great fun today since I am a big fan of A.I in itself and hopefully I’d get to work more on it in the future.
Friday
On out last day at Red hat it was a Robotic type of day where we had to create our on code for our robot cars and race with them. Our team came second but only by a difference of one second which made the loss a lot more hurtful but it was still quite fun.
For lunch today we had a pizza party which made it a last great day to spend with the people I worked with.
Overall, I had a great time at Red hat this week, I learned a lot while I was here, I met great people and had a lot of fun with the people and workers around me. In the near future I hope to come back here for a full time job here in Red hat after finishing my leaving cert or during/after collage and I hope to meet all the people that I worked with in the future.
And while there were some things that I struggled in at times, the positives far outweighed the negatives.
Signing off, Keelan McCormack.