What did you do this past week?

This past week I finished my OS project 3 over the weekend. We had to use 2 slip days, because we wanted to improve our past project 2 code to prevent synchronizing issues that may arise in our final project (since project 3 and 4 code all depended on project 2). Even after constant reviews by the TAs and our professor and fixing several synchronization issues, our code never was completely synchronized. Hopefully project 4 will work out.

The Life project was pretty smooth. We went off of our Object-Oriented design from last week on Tuesday, and ended up finishing the project in < 3 days. It still amazes me that for most of the projects for OOP, the hard part was creating a design for the code. Implementing and going through the development process in was Ezpz.

I also happened to stop by UT’s silent bike auction, in efforts to buy a new bike. Unfortunately I wasn’t really prepared with a budget, and went off with a naive 20 dollars as a budgeted price. A sad mistake, because though the starting bid is at minimum $5, many bikes ended up selling from 50-200 dollars. After 2 phases of auctions, I decided that I would test my luck with online shopping rather than this auction.

I am not one of the best people to ask to spend money, and even though prices can be cheap at auctions, the price can become super inflated when two people fight over a given product. These auctions always come down to how much a person values that product, and many times, it ends up being a winner’s loss. Interestingly enough, after talking with some friends who went to the bike auction, unlike usual auctions which are psychological and can become exponentially priced, the silent auction is more dependent on timing, and whether you can time your bid submission just before the bid closed. I might try this concept out next bike auction, and maybe successfully nab a bike that way!

Other than that, my week was pretty chill. Getting assigned projects, yet also preparing for the end of the semester brings about conflicting emotions for me. As much as I want to end off the semester, there’s so much in my (and everyone’s) path in order to reach that. Also, even though this semester has been busy, I really enjoyed all the projects I had, and being able to take time even with all that busyiness to do hackathons. Hopefully this drive to learn and do stuff doesn’t get extinguished during the next semester.

What’s in your way?

Mainly the Operating System’s final project. Thanksgiving break is coming so, but it’s very likely that I will be working on it during my break… So that’ll be a bit painful.

Also OOP exam is just around the horizon. I will need to prepare for that, and because of my messed-up sleep schedule, I’ve been very out of it during classes. Hopefully reviewing the notes and code that Downing posted as well as practicing implementations of concepts will be sufficient enough.

OOP Class Impressions

I feel a bit sad that we won’t be having anymore projects for the class, at least explicitly. I really enjoyed solving the problems through design, and going through the design process. Almost like a mini internship. I’m looking forward to the next time I take a class with Downing.

What will you do next week?

Next week will be a continuation of work on file systems. (Oh Pintos, this’ll be or last prolonged time together) Also, I’m finally going home! God bless thanksgiving T.T It’ll be awesome to see family (especially parents) and friends that I don’t usually get to be with. (though maybe I chose to avoid them…) So, lots to look forward to!

Tip of the Week

I’ve been trying to develop a messenger bot on Facebook. It’s giving me an amazing opportunity to learn and develop in Node.js. It was a bit hard to follow Facebook’s tutorial online since it had very broad specs on what software to use, but fortunately there’s a really good step-by-step tutorial online for putting together the Facebook Messenger bot with Heroku. You can see the tutorial here.