Ríona Ní Thuathaigh Blog
Monday
When we first came in we were assigned desks and laptops for the week. We started the day by doing icebreakers in the Bolger Suite with Jen, James, Pat and Dominic. We were assigned famous people or characters and had to ask questions to figure out who we were. James gave a small talk about the company and it’s history. Then we were given a tour of the office by Becky and we played Mario Kart as a group and had a lunch break.
After lunch we had a workshop on agile. David showed us a presentation and explained to us what agile was and how it is put into practice. We put the method into practice by making Mr. Potato Heads in groups. We had to make changes to our Potato Heads according to the needs of our customers, Jen and Pat. We then presented our Potato Heads to the group, explaining our choices while making it. At the end of the day we created GitHub accouts so we could edit our blog throughout the week.
Tuesday
When we came in in the morning we had a stand-up in the Bolger Suite where we went around th room and individually said what we did yesterday and what we will be doing throughout the coming day, we would continue these meeting throughout the week. After the stand-up, Pat taught us about a type of coding called bash. He taught how to use it and how to perform some basic commands. Then Pat showed us how to edit our blogs on GitHub on our own forks and save our work in commits, and then how to send a pull request to get our commits added to the main repo.
After that we had lunch break for an hour and after lunch we reconvined in the Bolger Suite to have a talk about student life from some current employees and student employees and they told us stories about their time in college and how they came to Red Hat. After that talk we had a talk about women in tech from a women who studied many different fields and different courses, but eventually ended up in computer science and is currently studying in college and working part-time in Red Hat. We asked as many questions as we wanted and after all the talks, we filled in our blogs on for the day at our desks.
Wednesday
Wednesday was an engineering day and we did tasks based on engineering. Firstly we did a stand-up in the Bolger Suite as we did yesterday. Anyone who had forgotten to do their blogs the day beforw got time to work on their blogs at their desks. After that we had a history of computing talk in Tuskar where James and a man called Kevin, explained how computing has come to be. Then we did a task in the canteen where we were given an envelope with spaghetti and a marshmallow and a string in it and we were tasked to make the marshmallow as far from the tabe as possible using only those items. The first ground, the group I was in won, with a total of 20 inches off the tabel. After that we did another round, which Jen used to explain the concept of open source coding and that others could now use our idea to use and tweak for themselves. In the next round, we built on our idea to make a stronger, and taller, build. We won again with a total of 31 inches off the table.
After lunch we met in the Bolger Suite for our next engineering task. We were put into different groups and given straws, paper, scissors, tape and a ball. We were told to make a rollercoaster for the ball which should include a 360 degree loop. We were told that “V.I.P” guests from America would come in to judge our rollercoasters. We started working an our build was looking promising and was quite sturdy, but after about an hour it all started to fall apart. We ended up with half of what we originally planned on, because it all fell apart. The guests came and judged our projcts and safe to say, we didn’t win. The we filled in our blogs again and went home.
Thursday
We had a stand-up in the Bolger Suite at the beginning of the day, as we have done every day. Today there was breakfast served in the kitchen and we all got to help ourselves to the selection of foods available. After the breakfast, Sean gave us a talk in the Bolger Suite about the different types of AI, machine learning, deep learning and generative AI. He explained how they all work and how thy are all connected. He taught us about the capabilities of AI and how it can be used. After that, Dominik taught us about InstructLab and the work he has been doing on it recently. He taught us about hallucinations in AI where they could make up completely false things if they do not know about what you are asking it, but it is completely confident in it’s answer. We were paired up to decide on a topic and contribute on the website, essentially teaching the AI about this topic. We iparted all the information we had collected into a form and submitted it to the website, like a pull request on GitHub, the owners would review the change ypu wish to make and they would merge it, or not, to the main repo to be uploaded on the website.
After lunch, we stayed in our pairs and were asked to make small projects on Rain Gardens. We had to research them and design on using AI, and we used image-generating AI to make mages of rain gardens. We used ChatGPT to research the rain gardens and DeepAI to generate images of rain gardens. We made a short slideshow which we presented to the class, along woth a diagram of a functional rain garden. After making our rain garden projects, we were given time to work on our blogs before a call in the Bolger Suite with a man from Italy called Paulo. Paulo told us about his passion for Formula 1 and how he wanted to combine his work with that. He explained how F1 engineers can track the cars data while it’s racing and see if there are any flaws. He wanted to do this but sadly, did not own an F1 car. One day he noticed one of the setting on his son’s F1 Xbox game which allows you to track the digital ar in real time while racing, as real F1 cars do. He was able to run the software on his computer and track all the car’s data on it as he wished to do. After the call we finished up our blogs again for the day.
Friday
This morning we had a stand-up in the kitchen instead of the Bolger Suite because they were setting it up for our workshop for the day, robots. We came into the Bolger Suite and we were split into groups of 3 o make our robots. Each group was given 2 microbits and a robot that we would be prgramming for a race at the end of the day. We were shown how to use the software to programme the robots and then given free rein over how to do them. At first my group were very confused and could not figure out how to make the robot work, but Adam helped us and soon we got the robot moving. We experimented with controls and the speed of the robot until we settled on how we wanted the robot to be. Once everyone had their robots working we had a break before we had our retrospective for the week where we gave feedback on our experience and what we would bring in, get rid of, or keep. We commented on our suggestions and Jen was very happy with the feedback. After that we had lunch and we had pizza, it waslovely and we all sat down together and enjoyed it.
After lunch we came back into the Bolger Suite and there was arace course set up on the tables with tape and Mr. Potato Heads set u around it. Jen exlained the rules to us clearly, if you drive outside the lines or hit any of the Mr. Potato Heads it was a 5 second penalty. My group went first and sadly lost our race. The group that won our race and the group that won the other competed in a final. Ater the final was won, the losing teams raced for 3rd, our group won. We played a few more races for fun andsadly, won none of those either. Though we were unsuccesful in the races, I really enjoyed prgramming and racing our robot cars.