What did you do this past week?

I spent a lot of time studying for my Operating Systems exam.

After I discovered the beauty of the whiteboard, I tend to go on there to copy slides, write out notes, and draw up diagrams to understand all the information from the past several weeks.

Since all my project members also had this incoming exam, we went on hiatus for our projects until we completed the exam. During that time, I was on severe code withdrawal (sad right?), that I started setting up a separate environment on VirtualBox the night before the exam in order to start working on my mini-project (a Facebook Messenger Bot). After the exam was over, it felt so good to get right back into programming. As much as I learned from the material I studied, for me, there’s way more gratification taking the knowledge learned from class and applying it onto code.

For OS’s virtual memory project, we finished implementing our frame table and most of the supplemental page table. We continuously got the error “undefined reference to…”, and it took a good 2 hours to fix before we realized that within our Makefile, we had an ‘=’ sign instead of a ‘+=’ sign. (All it takes is one symbol to break your code…).

For OOP project, my partner Alfred and I finished the project off smoothly. It was impressive how our first design which we spent 7 hours scheming ended up working on the first try (aside from minor bugs). In fact, we could get to work on unit-testing, documentation, and project workflow after 4-5 hours of coding in Darwin.h/c++ and RunDarwin.h/c++. I look forward to the final project, since it looks like we will be working once again with inheritance and more abstract interaction between objects, and hopefully we’ll achieve the same results as the last project.

What’s in your way?

Getting more sleep. I’m going to be doing a hackathon for each of the next two weeks, so I need step up on my game with my sleep schedule so I won’t face the repercussions of hackathons.

Additionally, I’m starting to get a feel of the Sophomore slump, hence the bad sleep schedule, and so my time management skills have diminished drastically. I had to pass/fail my accounting class because I knew I couldn’t devote the time to the class while keeping up with 3 other project-based CS classes. Hopefully I will get more motivation and energy to do my work more efficiently and passionately rather than going with the flow.

Most of all, recruiting has been hitting me hard lately, and with limited time from all said projects, I’ve been unable to prepare myself to the fullest for interviews, and thus, experience a whole bunch of rejections. The prospects for this summer don’t look too bright at least during this semester, but with a bit of luck and devotion, I can prepare myself enough to present my best to companies. (And get that internship!)

OOP Class Impressions

Class has been relatively nice. I’ve found that the concepts learned in class, such as the A&& (r-value parameter) and the move constructors/assignment operators have been described so well, that I somehow internalized them easily.

When I took the stressful 3 min quizzes, there was not enough time to grasp the code, but somehow I could get all the questions right! Though the questions confused me and we only went a day over those concepts, the answers seemed to make logical sense… which means I must be learning! (Always a great sign of a good teacher, or too easy of a class… and knowing OOP, it must be the former).

There has been some repetition in the class, where were told to implement the move constructor/assignment operator at two different class times, but it makes sense that he did that to remind students what was going on in the past lecture.

What will you do next week?

Indigitous Hack. Can’t wait to work on the challenges involving advancing God’s kingdom. I don’t know which ones I will work on, but the translate project for the Bible seems interesting.

I also plan to finish my Virtual Memory project for Operating Systems by Friday so that I can be worry-free during MLH Prime, another hackathon I plan to go to (but depending on the OS project progress amount, I might not go…)

Finally, with the final OOP project coming out, I’m preparing myself for another 7 hours of designing to solve this next problem.

Tip of the Week

For Slosh social dance, some of us programmers we’re planning on creating a web/mobile app in order to enhance and easily facilitate tasks for teaching nights, help schedule Spotify songs easily, and take song requests from dancers. To connect mobile and web platforms together easily, we plan on using libGDX. Even though it’s a gaming platform, it seems that the code can be programmed to accommodate with what we need, and they have a good amount of documentation! (which is always great when using open source). So if you’re looking to build the next best App, without having to worry about programming for each specific platform, consider using it!