2016, Jobs and the future!

If this year has taught me anything, it has taught me this : I am not very good at blogging. 

Some day I might get into the habit of actually updating here regularly with projects and other cool stuff that I'm tinkering about with, but until then here is a basic life update with a vague promise to continue updating! 

So a lot has happened since October 2015 and finishing the MSc. A new year has dawned, new technologies and games have been released, VR has become a lot bigger and I now have a job! 

Relatively recently I have started a job at Codeplay Software as a Software Engineer. Codeplay are a group of heterogeneous systems experts who develop tools, as well as other projects, targeting GPUs and other hardware. They do a lot of other things so please check out the site for more information : https://www.codeplay.com/ 

Since starting at Codeplay in April I've started working on the ComputeAorta project and had the great opportunity to visit the Silicon Milk Roundabout tech job fair in London, meeting lots of interesting potential applicants. So far I'm having a great time and look forward to learning much more as well as expanding and contributing my skills in my role.

Prior to this I worked as a Lab Associate for Disney Research in Edinburgh from the New Year up until starting at Codeplay. Whilst there I got the chance to see and work on a few interesting projects that Disney is working on. I look forward to seeing how the projects I contributed prototypes to turn out in the years to come! 

As such, 2016 has been a pretty busy but fulfilling year for me so far and I'm looking forward to having this trend continue. Lots of stuff due on the horizon and I'm hoping that once I am more settled I will be able to better divide my time up between personal projects, gaming and work. 

Here's hoping that I will finally get back into these posts with more interesting updates about some of the stuff I'm working on. Until that time, thanks for reading!

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Email: markmmiller@hotmail.co.uk
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The End of University and Thoughts on the Future

Hey there, so now University has been officially completed! My honours project and viva voce have been completed, all exams are done and now it's just a matter of deciding what to do for the future. My marks and grades should come in the beginning of June and my graduation will be in July. In the meantime however I need to decide between two courses of action for the immediate future and that is either getting a job or post-graduate education. Currently I have received an offer for a funded PhD in Pervasive Parallelism at Edinburgh University which stands as a good contender, however on the opposing side getting a job in industry is an attractive option. Money and experience is always a good thing. As such these last couple of weeks have been a form of turmoil as I slingshot between the two but there's not much that can be done until I receive back all my formal offers. As such I shall post an update in the coming weeks.

However, in the meantime, now that university is over my goal is to continue honing the skills I've picked up over my time here. Alongside this I aim to finish many of the side projects that I haven't had time for over the past few weeks not to mention all the unplayed games in my steam library that need finishing. Currently I'm in the process of writing a neural network library, the goal of which is to make an optimised package that will integrate into your C++ project with ease to provide automatic fast neural networks. All you will have to deal with on your end is deciding network topologies and normalising the input data. It's nearly complete but most of the trouble is getting my head around the neural networks in the first place and making sure the classes actually work. I'll throw up a link to the github repo once I get version 1.0 working properly.

Anyways, apart from these things I'm back to writing and game design as well and will be looking into Unreal Engine 4 stuff as I'm hoping to learn that over the next few weeks. Not much else to say really other than it's been a fun few years at university but I'm looking forward to moving on to bigger and better things! 

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Email: markmmiller@hotmail.co.uk
Xbox Live: Dr Death MK 2
Steam: 7thsanctum
Follow @7thsanctum
Origin: 7thsanctum
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