Carlos Diogo Homepage

On January 2002 started my final project to complete my degree. The project was called Enterprise Information Portal and was done over an 6 months internship at Infineon Technologies SA, a semi-conductor backend located in teh are of Vila do Conde , Portugal.

The project consisted in replacing their old intranet platform by a dynamic platform that would allow news postings, document archiving, dynamic information over departments and groups, personal advertisements, weather and cultural information etc.

The project consisted of several phases from requirement gathering , specification , database modeling , implementation , test , release and documentation.

The technological platforms used were an Oracle database and IIS. The coding was done using ASP. My past experience with web-applications and PHP was easily translated to this project and my learning of VBscript was quite fast.

Besides maximizing my habilities and understanding of webapplication this project also introduced me to a new area , web crawling and content parsing.

In 2002 there were no such things as feeds. If you needed to include some information from another website you would need to fetch it and parse it to the format you needed. This was the case for the news, weather and cultural content of the intranet portal.

Several crawlers and parsers were designed in VB and were triggeres by a cron job on the server.  The crawlers would collect the webpage html code , and the parser would select and  retrieve the data out of the html page. The data was then stored on the database and presented in the portal.

The project was a success and was graded 17.5/20.  My internship was extended for another six months and i kept working on web-application targeting content management.

The last two years of my degree were focused on Telecommunications and Electronics.  Advanced electronics, Chip design , Digital filters , Networks , Telecommunications theory, Mobile Communications, Artificial intelligence were some of the main subjects.

Over these two years my productivity was more on hardware and low level programming, having created an intrusion alarm, parking garage controller  and a  speed radar.

On the last semester i probably had then the subject that brought me back to software creation , and introduced me my favorite platform , the internet.  The subject was focused on the principles of internet, introduced the HTML language and to the end introduced also the JAVA language. The subject had a small project component and for that i developed and web-statistics portal based on PHP.  I remember i was very proud with the result and i was awarded with the excellent grade.

This was the awakening of my software creator vein that would influence the choice of my final project.

In my University the first three years of any Engineering degree shared most of the subjects. Several aspects of mathematics and physics were covered intensively. Within the subjects i recall Algebra,  Statistics, Mathematical  Analysis, Numerical Methods , Classical Mechanics, Magnetism, Waves and many more.

Besides this , the first three years of engineering also covered the diverse fields of Electrotecnic engineering as Electronics, Microprocessors and Signal Theory of the Electronics and Telecommunications branch, Electric Machines and Energy systems of the  Energy branch and another couple of subjects of the Automation branch.

I was always a quick learner and due to that i was always able to skip the theoretical lessons and focus on the practical sessions of each subject , easily catching up. These quick learning and understanding also allowed me to just study for a couple of days before each exam and achieve good results.

This cocktail of physics and advanced mathematics allowed my analytical and problem solving skill to develop further. The contact with different subjects, providing ‘appetizers’ on several areas besides the pure electronics field together with my constant appeal to learn new things probably gave me the ability to be able to work on several areas and quickly become and expert in each one of them.

The first three years of Engineering were for the sure the hardest ones and in those years my software creator vein  was more or less sleeping