HYPERAXE

This is my small story of making Filipinos proud and somehow let others know that we Filipinos are great in our own ways.

There was this little project that a company in the US posted in a website where programmers around the world can work on. I decided to take on this little project, since I just thought maybe it’s about time I start programming java again so as not to get that rusty after around 5 months of not developing anything major in Java. The project concerns web services wherein you should create a library that would be used by any java client (PC or mobile) to connect. SOAP and JAX-RPC should also be used as the communication protocol between the client and the server side. Whew! Sounds quite complicated ei? But it was fairly simple, if you really know what you’re doing.

There were 8 of us who worked on the project, which came from different parts of the world. The team was composed of programmers from China, India, US, and Europe. I never really know at first that it was some sort of a competition on getting a full time job for the company. I just tried it out since I got nothing to lose anyway.

The first round was a bit easy, since it’s more or less just socket programming of some sort. The manager judged the project by how cleanly the code was done and how it conforms to Java coding standards and best practices. Sad to say, I only ended up second place and one person from India got the top place in the first round. It was good though that the top 2 of the first round (which includes yours truly), were asked to move on to the second round. The second round was fairly easy, but a twist was introduced in the middle of the round. The twist was that a certain Java library or API library isn’t available on a certain device so we have to find a way to still make it work. Well to make the long story short, I managed to make it work, and my competitor from India somehow had some problems keeping up with the requirements. So I was victorious on the second round and alone I moved to the third and final round. The third round was on integrating the codes we’ve done so far with an existing system and as much as possible this integration should be hidden from the client side through the use of interfaces and the web services. It wasn’t that hard but the only problem I had was some sort of miscommunication as to how each interface should work with each other since the requirements at the beginning of the round are a bit vague. Nevertheless, I pulled it off and ended up the winner. I was then surprised to be offered the full time position, and looking at the profile of the company they really just do hire top-notch programmers and it felt good that I was considered as one.

I guess this only proves that even though Filipinos are in the 3rd world country, we are still 1st class professionals in the IT world. Mabuhay!!!

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