Hello Again; here's what I've been up to the past few months.

I feel like my approach to blogging has been a bit too, well, tech blog like. I like writing about it to an extent but at the same time, I feel as if each blog post needs to be of equal detail to my last and it ends up being a post reporting on something new rather than just my thoughts on it. Which has put me off blogging a bit, in fact its been months since I've blogged and the last entry I had drafted was a long piece on Windows 8. I'd even gone to the extent of having multiple sections but juggling this and multiple projects just isn't as easy to manage as I thought. So rather than thinking, "I still need to blog about MWC (Mobile World Congress), Samsung's GS4 or Blackberry's failure", I'm going to sum up what I've been up to and start afresh. If I miss a major event, I miss a major event.

So what has been happening in the past couple months all one of you may ask? Well November-December time was quite busy for me not just because I was in two group projects but on top of this work, I had been involved in planning two major events as part of the Computer Society. One I had been planning since September and that was a Skype Talk with the amazing people over at Valve.

I was quite surprised at how open and how willing someone like Chet Faliszek was to give up some time just to talk to us. I feel that speaks in abundance to how much Valve care about Education. In fact in preparation for the talk I found out Valve often do talks to encourage people to get into the Video Games Industry. I was kinda star struck almost since Chet Faliszek was a key writer to Half Life 2 and Portal 2 (some of my favorite games) and Doug Church had worked on so many legendary titles such as the Ultima series, Thief series, Deus Ex and Portal 2. It was really an honor just to be able to host something like that. The talk itself went smoothly and it was great to hear these Video Game legends talk about their experiences during development and I definitely took away some great advice from that talk such as the best way to get out there is to actually have a finished product out there as it shows you can ship a piece of software. They talked about a whole range of things including Game Jam's as Doug Church had been to and organised quite a few and gave some great advice. I really hope it helped those who attended in their careers in future as their was a lot of stuff that could be learned from that talk. I can't thank my lecturer  Simon Grey enough as he helped quite a lot in setting up the talk and most of all thanks to Chet Faliszek and Doug Church for giving up their time just to speak to us.

I probably wrote more in that paragraph than I thought so I'll try and keep the rest short. I also helped organise a Charity Ball called VideoBash. We had a similar event the year before but this time we decided to fund the event ourselves and give all the ticket sales to charity. The event went really well we had a DJ and we had multiple booths of games consoles including a projector where we had a tournament. It was good fun and we raised quite a bit for Macmillan and the Make A Wish Foundation. For me it was key that we raised a lot of money for charity and I found out afterwords that people were paying more at the door so more went to charity which was incredibly generous of them.

We also restarted the game dev talks and we had Christophe talk about using a 2D Camera in games. It was a really well put together talk with some great tips. You can check out his blog for the files as well as the presentation. The Windows Games Ambassadors (John and Josh) for our University have carried on the Game Development sessions so that it becomes a session for people to carry on work on their games which is a great opportunity for those wanting to improve their portfolio. Also I took part in a Game Jam called Three Thing Game. Our game wasn't amazing but it was still a great experience and I learned some valuable lessons from it.

We also had a Linux talk in February which went fairly well and it was about the basic set up as well as how to set up a Linux server. Recently we had a talk from Orta Therox on working at a start-up and he shared some insight on the trials and tribulations of working at a start up as well as the instability of it. It was an eye opener for me and I think it was useful for some of the ComSoc members.

Currently I am working on my Final Year Project but I feel I should leave discussion of that for another post as this is already quite a lengthy post. I think I've covered everything that's happened in the past few months outside of University work.