How to write a Good CV

It’s the month of April now and we only have another two months left to leave the University. As such, everybody is busy seeking jobs and the first step to a successful job interview is molding your CV with the right ingredients. So I thought of talking about how to write a good CV as a fresh graduate that can make you an attractive choice for any organization of your liking.

What is a CV?

CV or Curriculum Vitae is a Latin word that would approximately translate in to [the] course of [my] life and it’s also known as Resume in the United States of America. As the translation correctly suggests, a CV is essentially a convenient representation of your life including the personal information and professional qualifications. Inevitably, it becomes a marketing document for the Recruitment Managers go through dozens of CVs per hour to say the least and your CV needs to have a great marketing appeal to stand out from the lot.

The difficulty is that, there is no correct way or format of writing a CV. It’s all up to you. But there are numerous formats available in the internet which you can go through and pick up the one that suits your needs best. Many people tend to think that a single CV is enough for almost any application they are sending out. In fact, I see this situation among most of my colleagues. The truth is, a CV should be tailored again and again depending on the job your applying to. The basic structure can be similar in all of them, but you would have to change the objective sector at the least. It is needless to say that a CV should be neatly typed and correctly spaced. It should be short; essentially 2 A4 pages, or a maximum of 3; and it should convey a positive impression about you to the person whose looking. A Good way to emphasize the related points is to use the point form stressing your strengths. A severe slip a lot of people make is having spelling mistakes. As much as a CV should be neat and with the straightforward font and formatting, it should also be perfect in spelling for otherwise, the examiner gets the feeling that you haven’t actually paid good care in preparing your CV which may make them reject your CV. That been said, I’ll talk about some important sections you should include in your CV as a fresh graduate.

• Personal Details

You should include your name, address, date of birth, telephone number and email address. You can also include your personal website if you have any and your online professional profile if available.

• Profile and Objectives

• Education and Qualifications

You should include the information about your degree here and you can also include the area you majored in. Depending on the job you are applying, tailor the way you present yourself and your education. If you have completed any Professional Qualifications like CCNA / CIMA etc, you can include them here. Another important thing is to mention your grades unless they are too poor in which case, omitting them would be a wise choice.

• Projects and Work Experience

In this section, elaborate on the projects you have completed. You should include a very brief introduction about the caliber of the project as well. The training Experience should be included here as well. Do write a brief introduction about the projects you did at the training establishment.

• Achievements and Interests

Write about the achievements you were able to get during your period as an undergraduate. You can also talk about your interests in general and if those relate to the job your applying for in any way, make sure you emphasize the point. For instance, if you’re applying for a Technical Writing Job and if you’re maintaining a great blog, emphasize that. Also if you have done any sports, this will be the chance to include that in your CV.

• Skills

This is not an essential element in your CV. It can either come in handy or it may backfire on you as well. So use with caution and my recommendation is not to use it. But in any case, you can include the skill set you have in this section. The trick is to include just the right skill set and just the right amount of skills. If you include a lot of skills, the recruitment manager would take you for a ‘Jack of All Trades, Master of Nothing’. On the other hand, if you include only a few skills, the recruitment manager would take you for an incompetent graduate. Both of these extremes are harmful to you, so manage it to fit somewhere in between.

• References

References are a good way of establishing that you actually are what your CV states you are. Most of the recruitment managers would take time to contact your referees and gather information about you before they make any decision, so make sure your referees know that you’ve included them in your CV and they are accessible. The rule of the thumb is to use two references. It would be an advantage if you can present a referee from the area of your job.

Enough said about the sections you have to include in your CV. I’ll talk about some tips on making your CV attractive which I may have already talked about before, but nonetheless, here you go!

1. Carefully layout your CV so that the Recruitment Manager makes up his mind not to throw your CV away!
2. Give out a Positive and Vibrant feeling with your CV. Negative CVs are real deal breakers.
3. Make sure your CV is concise, the recruitment manager won’t like it if your CV is too long and stuffed. On the other hand, don’t make it shallow either. Find the perfect balance for yourself.
4. Only include information that is true and verifiable. If the recruitment manager gets the slightest hint on a lie, your DONE!
5. Typically the recruitment managers first tend to look at the upper middle part of the first page of your CV. So make it count.
6. Check and Recheck your CV for Spelling and Grammatical mistakes and correct them.
7. Don’t indicate anything about the Salary in your CV. You can negotiate about that if you’re called for an interview.
8. Always include references opposed to putting “References available on request” which would be a dumb action.
9. When you use the common terms such as “Team Player” , “Hard Working”, “Proactive”, “Detail Oriented” etc, make sure they are well placed and rehearsed. Otherwise opt from using them at all.
10. The profile is something you can opt to put as well. This is because a bad profile can make you unemployed forever. On the other hand, a carefully tailored Profile may be the excellent appetizer for the recruitment manager to keep reading.

I think that sums it up. Please note that the particular section layout and the format is best suited for Fresh Engineering Graduates, but it can also be used as a general guideline for any other discipline as well.

Good Luck in compiling your CV guys! Drop me a line if you need any help with it and do comment on what you think about the post.

What Dr.Zakir Naik got Wrong [Lord Buddha (Maithriya) is the Prophet Muhammad PBUH]

This is a counterpart of the same composition I’ve written in Sinhala and the translation is for the purpose of wider reach. This is based on the following video, so better to take a look at first.
 

 
There, Dr. Zakir Naik mentions that Lord Buddha (Maithriya) is indeed the Holy Prophet himself. He tries to justify this by quoting some verses from the ‘Thripitaka’. I’d start this article by asking Dr. Zakir Naik not to lie. Either he has misinterpreted Buddhism or he’s doing this with some ulterior motive. In any case, let me bring about a single argument to prove him false in this matter.
 
What Dr. Zakir Naik says about Buddhas is partly true. There has been Buddhas before Gauthama Buddha, who is our Lord Buddha, and there will be Buddhas to come, in specific Maithriya Buddha, who is the next enlightened Buddha. But his concept of the Maithriya Buddha is heavily mistaken. Lord Gauthama Buddha did not preach that Lord Maithriya Buddha will have more followers than him. But Lord Gauthama Buddha preached that the Buddhism would prevail for more than 5000 years and only after that Lord Maithriya Buddha will be born. We need to look at the purpose of a Buddha to understand this in full. A Buddha merely resurfaces the Holy Truths in this world when eventually they are covered by dark forces. Thus all Buddhas preach the same Dhamma (content).
 
In essence, the contradictions in timeline is enough to break Dr. Zakir’s statement, but let me give you another solid argument so as to why Lord Mathriya Buddha can never be Prophet Muhammed PBUH.
 
Lord Buddha preaches not to harm the lives of any animal, let alone the life of a man. That is the first disciple of five disciples preached by Buddha.
 

I will avoid harming any form of life.

 
Further, if you consider the life of Lord Buddha, he never ordered a killing on his behalf even when his life was threatened. He did not encourage any form of harm to any animal, directly or indirectly. Further, upon Enlightenment, a Buddha can not have a normal life because according to Buddhism, Buddha is simply without any bonds. Since every Buddha is similar and second to none, Lord Maithriya Buddha is the very same as Lord Gauthama Buddha.
 
This is what Dr. Zakir Naik deliberately avoids explaining. Holy Prophet Muhammad has ordered enough and more killings himself, he has ordered a vast number of raids in tribal villages and trade routes. I am not going to justify nor criticize why the Holy Prophet had to kill and direct his followers to kill, and for the sake of argument, I’m going with the fact that they did this in self defense. But my dear Dr. Zakir Naik, A Buddha never encourages his followers to be violent and harm another life even if his life is at stake, let alone participate in the killings himself. Isn’t this a direct contradiction? And that is why Holy Prophet PBUH can never be Lord Maithriya Buddha.
 
Moreover, Holy Prophet has directly ordered what his followers should do for wrong-doers in a graphical way involving a lot of violence.
 

…they were brought, and he had their hands and feet cut off. Then he ordered for nails which were heated and passed over their eyes, and they were left in the Harra (i.e. rocky land in Medina). They asked for water, and nobody provided them with water till they died (Abu Qilaba, a sub-narrator said, “They committed murder and theft and fought against Allah and His Apostle, and spread evil in the land.”) (Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 261)

 
This is about 8 cattle thieves. I’m not saying that the punishment Holy Prophet gave them was fair nor do I say it’s not fair for it’s not the purpose of this article. But the Analogy to Lord Maithriya Buddha completely ends here for a Buddha would NEVER order such a harsh treatment, not even at people who tried to kill him. So please do understand what your saying is not true at any given scenario. Oh and another thing, A Buddha can not live a normal life after Enlightenment as I’ve said before and that means no sexual life with women. I don’t need to tell you that Holy Prophet had 11 wives, so there’s another contradiction.
 
Thus only say things that you understand and know to be true without misleading the people. My fellow Muslim friends, I don’t have any intention of insulting you, Islam nor Holy Prophet Muhammad; May Peace Be Upon Him; Please understand what I’m saying and that Dr. Zakir Naik is indeed wrong in this context.
 
This article is also open for discussion, so if you have any comments or arguments, I’d like to know them!
 

Wanna to Play Wumpus World?

Greetings guys,

This is not exactly a post, I’ll talk about what Wumpus World is in the time to come, but till then, try this little game and if you have struggled to understand the concepts of AI like me, you’d probably find this a blessing!

Play Wumpus World

Cheers!

Is your CPU Hogging?

Recently, I was battered by a CPU hogging problem in my laptop. I used to have a pretty decent laptop and the fans were working well and keeping their noises low. However, one day when I started it up the fans were working frantically like it’s the end of the world and the user experience was really bad. I was like, what the hell is happening and started to investigate.

When something like this happens, your usual suspect is an attack of a malicious software and just as I was thinking of performing a deep scan, I took time to check out the process explorer to see what is actually hogging up my CPU. The culprit was a exe file called PresentationFontCache.exe and Voila! It been an exe, I figured it must be a malicious software and I’m definitely in trouble, but from a little search with Google landed me on the conclusion that it is indeed a legitimate windows file. To be precise, it’s the font cache for Windows Presentation Foundation.

So why in the name of devil would this be bothering me and eating my CPU cycles? well that’s what I asked Google too and I found no feasible explanation with the vague explanation of it might be because your using too many fonts in your system, which I don’t believe to be the case. Moreover, I wasn’t even using WPF for development purposes at the time, so there was no particular need of the font cache for me as far as I could collect. For this specific situation, two solutions were suggested.

1. Go to the services and disable PresentationFontCache.exe as a service and Voila, your done!
• [UPDATE] This particular flavor did not work for me because I couldn’t stop the service, I mean, it just didn’t react. It was always showing starting  as the status for some stupid reason.
2. Navigate to \Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local and delete the font cache file in the folder.
• [UPDATE] This worked for me just fine and solved the problem in a flash. Now my CPU cycles are put to better use that serving some use of a stupid font cache and the fans are all rolling like babies.

Cakephp – A Rapid Prototyping Framework for PHP

I wanted to write about cakephp for a long time, but now only I got a window to do that. I have been exploring cakephp for the last 6 months for a project that I was assigned at the Eurocenter DDC in my Industrial training period. As boring as it may sound, cakephp is actually a brilliant landscape to develop your coding skills in php while working in a MVC architecture as well as been exposed to the idea of a framework. It uses industrial standard Design Pattern for ease of use and convention over configuration paradigm. Oh wait, what does that mean?

Well, in Layman’s terms, it means that you have a set of requirements that cakephp wants you to adhere to. If you indeed adhere to them, your life will be pretty easy and there will be minimal configuration involved. In any case, if you do not adhere to these conventions, you will have some configuration to be done in order to make the cakephp core work correctly.

Let us have a look at what it provides.

Latest version	2.0.4
PHP4
PHP5
MVC
Multiple DB
ORM
DB Objects
Templates	-
Caching
Validation
Ajax
Auth Module
Modules
Cost	Free

The main requirements for the use of cakephp is as follows.

• HTTP Server. For example: Apache. mod_rewrite is preferred, but by no means required.
• PHP 5.2.9 or greater.

Technically a database engine isn’t required, but we imagine that most applications will utilize one. CakePHP supports a variety of database storage engines:

• MySQL (4 or greater)
• PostgreSQL
• Microsoft SQL Server
• SQLite

I’ll be writing on how these requirements would affect the installation and how to install cakephp core to get it up and running in the next post.

Till then, Cheers!

Sway: What I See!

Sway is a song sung by the Perishers, first heard it in One Tree Hill and recently reminded by a good friend of mine. When I got to think about it, this was what I came into my mind about the song.

I talk to you as to a friend
I hope that’s what you’ve
come to be
It feels as though we’ve
made amends
Like we found a way
eventually

It was you who picked
the pieces up
When I was a broken soul
And then glued me
back together
Returned to me what
others stole

I don’t wanna hurt you
I don’t wanna make you sway
Like I know I’ve done before
I will not do it anymore
I’ve always been a dreamer
I’ve had my head among
the clouds
Now that I’m coming down
Won’t you be my solid ground?

I look at you and see a friend
I hope that’s what you wanna be
Are we back now where
it all began?
Have you finally forgiven me?

You gathered my dreams in
When they all blew away
And then tricked them
back into me
You saved me I was
almost dead

I don’t wanna hurt you
I don’t wanna make you sway
Like I know I’ve done before
I will not do it anymore
I’ve always been a dreamer
I’ve had my head among
the clouds
Now that I’m coming down
Won’t you be my solid ground?

I don’t wanna hurt you
Like I know I’ve done before
I will not do it anymore…

I don’t wanna hurt you
I don’t wanna make you sway
Like I know I’ve done before
I will not do it anymore
I’ve always been a dreamer
I’ve had my head among
the clouds
Now that I’m coming down
Won’t you be my solid ground?

As far as I can make out, this seems to be a song sung by a lover to his/her ex possibly in the context of reuniting with the ex again. But possibly it might be a context where a one sided love exists while the other doesn’t exactly feel the same way towards the other.
The singer is pretty determined not to hurt the other again. It seems that the singer has gone through a lot and has lost a lot as well as had her heartbroken. The words


It was you who picked
the pieces up
When I was a broken soul
And then glued me
back together
Returned to me what
others stole

emphasizes how much it meant to the singer. The singers life has been in a rampage when the subject of the song has re-entered the arena and backed her up. Perhaps this is a post scenario of a triangular love story where the singer was loved by two and the choice singer made turned out to be a bad one and the other guy has been there for the singer to lend his shoulder when needed. The singer might have lead him to some extent it seems because she specifically says that she doesn’t want to make him sway like before, which evidently means she has done it priorly. By which means, is not specified, but that seems to be the case.

Now the subject of the song is there for her, but the singer isn’t sure about her decisions anymore. She is afraid to take the risk and move onwards with life and she doesn’t seem to be feeling sure about herself either. Thus she emphasizes that she doesn’t want to hurt the subject like she has done before, and the best way to do that is to become friends, where it all started. The swaying is synonymous to her state of mind which changes from giving her heart to the subject to been just friends.
She has figured that she was confused about the whole thing in the latter stage of the drama and is determined to clear the clouds away. To do that she needs the subject to hold her tight and be there for her until she is on her nerves again. All these things she expect from the subject of the song while on a basis of friends where she wouldn’t have the chance of hurting him. Her intentions can be seen as pure, but it doesn’t seem that she is thinking on the perspective of the subject of the song.
Taking his perspective in to consideration, we can only conclude that even though he has agreed to been friends, that was half heartedly and by making amendments to his actions. It resonates that he is willing to take the risk and genuinely do care about the singer. Though the song says that the singer would no longer hurt him by swaying, and she also mentions that they are been just friends, all we can conclude is that might not be fair on the subject of the song. For instance, the singer can think on the perspective of the subject once and understand his concerns and intentions. Perhaps I might be wrong, but I think if he was there for her when there was no one else to stitch her up and make her whole again, we can assume he’s willing to do that again. So as of time when the singer realizes this, she will understand his commitment and would genuinely stop swaying.

Are you a matador?

I’ve always had this question over what actually makes one to help another and how does the variation of us helping one another happens with one moving higher up in a corporate ladder. Sometimes we think it’s ubiquitous and one tends to help less and less as one climbs higher and higher. Somebody actually had a row with me telling me that even thinking about it is futile and it’s just too apparent. But I beg to differ for I have found, more than once that is, people who are actually in a high stance in the corporate ladder helping the bloomers in various ways, simply out of goodwill. So as a generalization, I don’t think that statement is true, but rather it depends on the circumstance and mostly on the person itself.
If one is brought up in such a way to appreciate the finer things in life, and by finer things I mean the contribution phase, they are more prone to be a helping hand no matter where they reside in. That is the beauty of it, they have realized that actually by lighting another candle, your light doesn’t get dimmer. The counterpart of this is where we encounter most of the time and that is why my friend was actually arguing that one just doesn’t appreciate helping when they are up the corporate ladder. Of course, I can’t blame him either, he has been let down once too much.
Anyway, moving on, the counterpart is actually branches into two categories. There are people who doesn’t help at all, but the only thing they do is not helping. They don’t show any interest further. But the dangerous kind is the one who acts like matadors. They not only don’t help you, but they actually try to run you down. This is mostly an issue of self esteem as far as I could gather through the experiences I could relate from my friends. It it actually a real barrier to get across these types of people. If you come across them, the best thing is to give side and just let them be.
But what actually made me write this post was something happened to me today. It actually made me realize again that no matter what my friend say, people who help without an apparent expectation in mind are there. The best thing about them is, they are really willingly help us and take it up to the next level and do a follow up as well. It’s amazing how much self confidence one can gain through simple incidents like this, but I would gladly reckon that it is indeed a pleasure to see such collaboration, dedication and contribution coming with such guidance, all in the face of good will.
I was determined to be a helping hand wherever necessary from the time I’ve been on my foot, my ground and my decision space and I was more and more determined to keep it that way from all the experiences I’ve gained throughout the time.

One needs to understand that your light doesn’t get dimmer even if you light another thousands of candles!