Ty Blog

This will be updated Daily all week.

Monday

potato head

On Monday morning I arrived at the Red Hat office in Waterford City. We were introduced to the receptionist Becky who is also the office manager. We were assigned desks and we got our very own laptop for the week. We logged into them and connected them to the office wifi. We then entered the Bolger Suite which is a big meeting room. We sat down at the tables and began doing some ice breakers. The game was every person had a celebritys name taped on their back and you had to ask the other yes/no questions to gather info and to be able to guess whos name you had on your back.

We then began the office tour and went around viewing all the different facilities the office has to offer. It connsits of lots of desks for the employees, a big kitchen/lounge area where we familiarized with the snack basket and the drink fridge. There is also a big pool room where me and the lads spend most our free time/breaks.

After the tour had finished we visited the bolger suite again and we were familiarized with James and his love of race cars we also had to name one interesting facts about ourselves where I mentioned how much I like woodwork. WE then had some free time where Jen (the main coordinator) took us to do a MarioKart tournament.

We then did some more talking with Pat (who is a very chill guy) We then did some work on Agile building with David with Mr Potato heads where we had to please the customers needs even if they change their needs every two minutes and we then had to stand up and describe and explain the troubles and high points that came with building our potato head.

Tuesday

pool table

This morning i arrived in the office at 9:30 as we had a project to do first thing in the morning. WE spoke about what we did yesterday and did our very first stand up. Afterwards we did some coding called bash on the computers where dominic gave a quick crash course to me and cian before the lesson started. At first i thought code looked like this 001001010 but the bash code looks very different.

Throughout the day we helped ourseleves with the free snacks and drinks from the fridge. I pray they restock the smoothies and the kinder buenos as i always miss to grab one before they are all gone.

After the bash coding we did some light work on the computers writing in our blogs explaining everything that we did on monday. Toay everyone was a lot more familiar with eachother so i think everone enjoyed themselves.

In the free time we had today me and the lads started a pool tournament , up first was Cian vs Robert which cian won which was a surprise because robert is the third best pool player in the ty group after jack and me. Next up was Jack vs Adam, jack took the early lead but adam got the comeback and won it in the end. In the third game it was me vs alex, i didnt really speak to alex yesterday but he turns out to be a really chill guy. Alex won the pool game and everyone was very happy for him even me.

We had a lunch break then and we walked to the shop to get a lovely hot chicken fillet roll.

After lunch all the ty students spoke about college life and the perks of doing computing in college with Pat, Sean, Dominic, Jen, Evan. We then had a speakerin speaking about women in tech and she told us her story. She was from ukraine originally and came to ireland because of the war, she is now completing her 8th level education in college in computing.

At the end of the day we wrote about the day in our blogs which you are reading now and we met continue on the pool tournament shortly. I look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow.

Wednesday

roller coaster

Today as usaual i arrived in the office at 09:24 so i had 6 minutes to read the white board and to meet the lads. I opened the door and robert and alex greeted me into the office. We took a walk to the pool room and then visited the bolger suite for our second stand up. We mentioned what we did yesterday and mentioned that some of the monitors werent working and that there was no smoothies stocked in the fridge. We asked Jen to see if there was any smoothies in the food supply room.

There was no smoothies…..

Let that sink in…..

We then noticed that adam made his wallpaper for his computer a picture of himself and robert started giving out. After this we had a small ten minute break but sadly the pool room was occupied so me, Jack, Adam, and Robert played mariokart and as usual adam won.

We then had James speaking to us about lots of different things such as the web, servers, future in technology, and what people are working on at the moment. We had a quick quiz at the start and me and robert were on a team and we almost got evry question right. James spoke about servers which i found inteeresting because they are what run all the pcs in red hat and in other places. We also had another red hat employee from northeren ireland who is also living in northeren ireland speaking a bit about what he does in red hat

We then had some free time and played some pool the games in the tournament todyay were me vs vicotor, cian vs robert, alex vs jeff. I won my match so that puts me joint lead.

WE then had a task where we had a marshmallow some raw spaghetti and some string and tape. The goal was to get the marshmallow as high off the table as possible. I was on team 3 with jack. We struggled at first beacause our spaghetti kept snapping and then jack messed about with some paper and created a sturdy looking structure that could possibly be the bass of our tower. We then made a teepee design with the spaghetti and sat the marshmallow on top of that. Jen then measured our tower and it was 20 inches. Then we had to do the task again but now we could use other peoples ideas as an example of open source code. WE then used our same idea but we reinforced our spaghetti by taping multiple pieces together so that it would be stronger

We then had an engineering task where we had to create a roller coaster out of paper straws and tape. The rolercoaster had to have a 360 loop in it that the ball ahd to travel around me and the lads figured out that we didnt have to stand the loop up straight so we put it vertical. Our team consisted of me, Jack, RObert and keelan. Although we had some technical issues with the tape and the cutting ratio, we got there in the end. Rob had an amazing idea of putting the loop inside a box to give a lot nore structural support. We had american redhat visitors in to judge our coasters but im certain that wasnt the reason they were here. We had to demonstrate our coastes actios to judges and ours successfully went all the way into the box we had taped to the desk. We took a photo with the team on front of our creation and moved to the kitchen to put it on display for evryone for tomorrow morning.

Then we did some work on the blogs to finish off the day and robert made me finish early.

Thursday

battlefront

As usual i entered the office at 9;30 and had to go to the bolger suite for my last stand up as i wont be in tomorrow. I mentioned that we won the rollercoaster project yesterday when the judges came in. we then went straight to the desks to wrte our blog where i met alex and robert chatting at there desks. I grabbed a quick drink while i was there.

We then got breakfast as today was thursday and the office gets breakfast delivered in on thursdays. As we finished Jen called s into the bulger suite as sean was going to gives us a talk on AI. He named the upsides and downsides to ai and a cheap way of automating tasks and even writing essays…

After that we had dominik in to do an ai based project. WE had to choose a topic i chose a game called battlefront 2. Instructlab was the name of the ai tool we were using. WE asked a question on our topic to the ai and if it didnt give us a straight anwser we had to feed it information. WE had to search on wikipedia facts and stats or even tables on our topics. We had to put all our data on the topic into our ai tool so that this ai could tool could take all this info and learn about the topic. Then when you ask a question after the ai had taken the data out of your script it needs to answer your answer.

After that me and robert messed about with our wallpaper on our laptops. Then it was lunch. Me cian and adam went to the shop then to grab a chicken roll for our lunch. When we came back we played a small game of pool but robert beat me :(

We then had a duo project on rain gardens. Me and Adam were together. We designed a rain garden for big corporate buildings such as the red hat buildings in the states. I drew a diogram of our plan based on what we decided a rain garden needs. WE designed it so that he gutters on the building gathr water into a tank. We also had a solar panel to power water sprinklers connected to the tank i mentioed before. These sprinklers were only activated when the plants needed water so that the plants wouldnt drown. After we gathered info on rain gardens we put it all into slides we had to make a presentation onfront of the group explaining the idea behind it.

After that you could probably guess back to the blogs before our zoom call with james and pablo. Pablo works on gathering stats and data for sports and the technology he uses was was used in thr olympics. He was a big ferrari and napoli fan.

As Paolo finished we headed back to our desks to finish our blog.

Friday

Red Hat Office

Sadly i wasnt in :(