As a recent year twelve graduate my knowledge of computer science was very limited and my ability to write working programs was all but none. So you can imagine my excitement when I heard of an opening for work experience with IBM's internationally renowned Ozlabs team, or as I knew them the Linux Gods. My first day of working at Ozlabs I learnt more about programing then in six years of secondary education. I met most of the Ozlabs team and made connections that will certainly help with my pursuit of a career in IT. Because in business its who you know more than what you know, and now I know the guys at Ozlabs I know how to write code and run it on my own Linux Distro. And on top of all the extremely valuable knowledge I am on a first name basis with the Linux Gods at the LTC.

After my first week at Ozlabs I cloned this blog from Octopress and reformatted it for pelican static site generator.For those who don't know Octopress is a ruby based static site generator so converting the embedded ruby gems to pelicans python code was no easy task for this newbie. Luckily I had a team of some of the best software developers in the world to help and teach me their ways. After we sorted the change from ruby to python and I was able to understand both languages, I presented my work to the team. They then decided to throw me a curve ball as they did not like any of pelicans default themes, instead they wanted the original Octopress theme on the new blog. This is how I learnt GitHub is my bestest friend, because some kind soul had already converted the ruby theme into python and it ran perfectly!

Now it was a simple task of re-formatting the ruby-gem text files into markdown which is pelican compatible(which is why we chose pelican in the first place). So now we had a working pelican blog on the Octopress theme, one issue it was very annoying to navigate. Using my newly learned skills and understanding of python I inserted tags, categories, web-links, navigation bar and I started learning how to code C. And it all worked fine! That was what I a newbie could accomplish in one week. I still have two more weeks left here and I have plenty of really interesting work left to do. This has been one of the greatest learning experiences of my life and I would do it again if I could! So if you are looking for experience in it or software development look no further because you could be learning to code from the people who wrote the language itself. The Linux Gods.