Hello Everyone!

Welcome back to Oxford! We hope you have had a great summer, and are well refreshed ready for the year ahead. And we hope those of you not in studying any more have a great summer none the less and are settling into your careers nicely.

First things first, we have a new website!!! You can check it out at: http://ox.compsoc.net/. There is still lots of work that needs to be done to it, but we have made that oh-so-difficult leap to actually implementing enough of it to switch over.

Second thing, Events!

This term is set to be a big one! With 3 events per week, we have plenty to keep you on your toes. Along with our usual wednesday evening events, we have our weekly "Geek Nights" which proved a success last year, and we're introducing a "Learn to Code" Course which will be held directly before the Geek Nights.

You can see the full termcard here: http://ox.compsoc.net/events/2013/michaelmas/ And learn more about "Learn to Code" here: http://ox.compsoc.net/learn/

For the time being, before 1st week commences, we have a Geek Night on Week 0

Geek Night 0

http://ox.compsoc.net/events/2013/michaelmas/geek_night_0/ Date: Saturday Week 0 - 12 October 2013 Time: 07:00 PM Facebook Event https://facebook.com/events/1398157007083334/Place: Undergraduate Social Area - Dept. of Computer Science http://ox.compsoc.net/events/venue/compsci_social_area/Tags: Geek Night http://ox.compsoc.net/events/tags/geek_night/ And the first main event is in 1st week and is a talk from Google:

Google: Engineering at Google: it's a little different

http://ox.compsoc.net/events/2013/michaelmas/google_talk/ Date: Wednesday Week 1 - 16 October 2013 Time: 06:00 PM Facebook Event https://facebook.com/events/1418356795049339/Place: Lecture Theatre A - Dept. of Computer Science http://ox.compsoc.net/events/venue/compsci_lta/Tags: Google http://ox.compsoc.net/events/tags/google/ Corporate http://ox.compsoc.net/events/tags/corporate/ Sponsor Event http://ox.compsoc.net/events/tags/sponsor_event/ Talk http://ox.compsoc.net/events/tags/talk/

Abstract

Being an engineer at Google is a fantastic experience. Most people know about some of our perks such as free food and fabulous offices - but what's the work like? How does it compare with other environments? I've been at Google for just over five years, with about ten years of industry experience before that, so I've seen a bit of both sides. In this talk I'll try to address four questions:

* What challenges are particular to Google (and other companies of similar scale) which don't affect most environments? * What challenges faced by smaller companies simply aren't a problem at Google? * Where does software engineering still have significant issues which hurt everyone, regardless of scale? * How can you get ahead of the game as a software engineer?

Bio

Jon Skeet is a Senior Software Engineer in Google's London office, where he's worked on Mobile Sync, Mobile Notifications, Windows Phone 7 Google Search App, and Google Offers. Beyond Google, he's better known for his is involvement in the C# community and particularly the Stack Overflow Q&A site. Jon has a maths degree and a diploma in computer science from "the other place."

We hope to see many of you at the upcoming events, and good luck for the year!

P.S: Keep an eye out for us at re-freshers' fair ;-)