In my undergraduate in Computer Science, I got the opportunity to work at IBM as a member of the Build Infrastructure Team. I had absolutely no clue what the Build Infrastructure Team is or does. Though I am no expert and I still have a difficult time explaining what I do to friends and family, I’ll try to tackle the subject to the best of my ability. This post is a precursor to an education session titled An Overview of DevOps and Builds I plan to give to new interns of the Build Infrastructure Team at IBM this May. I am hoping my actions of writing a blog will prepare me for my presentation. (On a side note, this is a good sequel to my previous blog about Software Ports)

Software porting is the process of adapting a program to be able to execute in another computing environment that differs from the originally intended computing environment.

I was recently watching a video by Live Overflow helping a person troubleshoot a format string exploit through Twitter, and saw something I was very curious about. In the video, the Yotuber poses a question to the person if they could describe how %2$s prints a string. I have never seen this syntax before. What does the dollar sign ($) serve in the format string? This got me curious so I went searching on the internet and the man pages to find out.

Reminiscing another problem I encounter during my internship at IBM, I encountered an issue with some internal tools during a server migration.

During my internship at IBM a while back, I recall encountering an error on some HP UNIX machine when I was trying to checkout a file using the CLI tool cleartool for the version control system Clearcase.

Having no good topic to write for this month’s blog post, I decided to write about the books I plan on reading for the year and why I chose to read them. I never was an avid reader. The books I read in Highschool for fun were typically old computer books I could find in the library or get as gifts. Although there were better books to read from, I learned a lot from them. I started to read and explore books of varying genres during my internship, which led me to read on a somewhat regular schedule. Visit the last section, if you want to see the list without any commentary.