Work on Salman's Blog

Year in Review: MuleSoft Dev

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 05:58:33 +0000

I’ve been working with a MuleSoft consultancy for the last year. This position was my first software engineering role since graduation. This month I was promoted to Lead Engineer. This was based on my performance review that took place last month. As such, I thought I’d share some notes from the performance review.

2021 was a busy year. I began working with my current company in late April. I was new to MuleSoft so began training immediately. I passed the MuleSoft Certified Developer (MCD) test on my first try after 2 months of studying.

RPM Packaging for JMC

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 07:47:28 +0000

When JDK Mission Control (JMC) was open-sourced, one of the main tasks for our team at Red Hat was to make it widely available to our developer community. This meant packaging the application for Fedora.

Fedora is a distribution of Linux sponsored by Red Hat. It is the bleeding edge of free software and the upstream source of Red Hat’s flagship Enterprise Linux distribution, RHEL.

I was tasked with packaging an RPM for JMC. This allowed me to take a deep dive into Maven, Eclipse RCP and RPM build tools.

JDK Mission Control

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 07:42:10 +0000

This was the project my team was working on during my coop at Red Hat in Toronto. Formerly Java Mission Control, the tool was a proprietary offering in Oracle’s Java subscription. It was open-sourced by Oracle in early 2018 (just before the start of my internship) as JDK Mission Control (JMC). It is now a project under the OpenJDK umbrella.

There was previously a similar open-source tool developed by the OpenJDK team at Red Hat called Thermostat. Red Hat decided to focus their efforts on improving JMC rather than working on Thermostat since JMC was already the de facto industry standard.

Adaptive Corrosion Protection System

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 06:50:17 +0000

I worked on this project as a Research Assistant at the Centre for Integrative Bio-Engineering Research (CIBER), a lab in SFU’s Faculty of Applied Sciences headed by Prof. Bozena Kaminska. The goal of the project was to develop a corrosion protection system using cathodic protection. It would measure soil conditions, calculate protection current and corrosion rate and supply protection voltage.

We forked an open-source project, DStat, that some researchers at University of Toronto had been developing. I worked on the GUI that would interface with the hardware module over serial USB.

Coop @ Red Hat (and IBM?)

Wed, 17 Jul 2019 21:18:57 +0000

I will be completing the fourth and final semester of my coop at Red Hat as a Software Engineering Intern at the end of summer. It has been an exciting opportunity to learn and develop my skills as a software developer in a real-world environment.

Over these 16 months, I was given the chance to work on a wide variety of challenges. I began with little to no knowledge about programming in Java. The OpenJDK team, which I joined in my second week, was about to begin working on a tool for JVM performance monitoring. The tool, JDK Mission Control (JMC), was open sourced by Oracle in early 2018 so my team was still wrapping up their old project.

TA: Day 0

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 21:03:38 +0000

This semester I was offered a teaching assistant position for CMPT 295 Introduction to Computer Systems. When I got the news, I was really excited because when I was applying for the position it felt like a completely useless attempt (like many others). But I still went through with it, mostly because it was a no-BS application (read: no cover letter required).

I first got the idea to apply for TA positions from Karol (a sessional instructor I had last year for a software engineering course).