Sprint 10 Review

-
The meeting yesterday with my professor went fine. It was quite brief, as there wasn’t much to discuss. I let him know that I had committed code to the SVN repository on Sunday, and that I had fixed all the bugs I know of and then started on UI improvements. I had a few questions on stuff I worked on during the sprint, which had all been from comments he’d made earlier, so I got clarifications on those items. He will pull my code on Wednesday and get it deployed on his server, so that’s pretty much the deadline for being done with stuff I want to actually be in the demo on Friday.

On Saturday I sent my advisor an outline of the slideshow presentation I’ll have to give, and he did say that was fine.

The other thing we got done during the meeting yesterday was making sure my laptop will work in the room where I’ll be presenting. One of my friends advised me to do that, and then I remembered that I’d had massive issues in that very room with my old netbook. I believe it was completely fruitless and I ended up having to borrow the instructor’s laptop. Luckily my new laptop worked like a dream. Just plugged in the VGA cable, and poof! It worked instantly. I don’t know if it was the laptop itself (as it is a different brand from ye olden netbook) or the shiny new OS (Win8), but either way it worked.

After Wednesday I’ll just get the slideshow done and study for the oral exam component. There are 4 areas I need to study: databases, software engineering, automata, and algorithms. The former two are because they’re specialties of the faculty members on my committee, and the latter two are because those are both required classes and questions on those areas are nearly always included in oral exams. I think this is evil since both those areas are totally theoretical and thus never used in actual work (and thus I barely remember anything about them), but whatevs. Algorithms I suppose ought not to be totally theoretical, but that’s the way the material was presented: there was no connection to practical work or information on how one might apply it to the real world whatsoever. It gave me a sad, to be sure.

So anyway now I just have to get a few last UI things done, and that’ll be that for programming. I’m taking off from work Wednesday through Friday, so I may be pulling an all-nighter to do the UI stuff I want to by tomorrow morning. It wouldn’t be college without an all-nighter, right?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Does it get easier?" Yes, but Also No...

-
Image
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay It's complicated... "Does it get easier?" I see some form of this question asked a lot in beginner programming groups. I always struggle with how to answer this honestly and clearly, because the truth is not that simple. In some ways it does get easier, but in other ways it is almost always going to be difficult if you are advancing in your career . If you are a programmer and your job is easy for years on end, the most likely explanation is that you're in the kind of dead-end position that people try to avoid, not the kind of position people dream about when they think of becoming a developer. Most likely you are not getting better at being a dev, not working with new tech or solving new kinds of problems, not being given more responsibility, etc. etc. etc. I've seen some pushback from other newbie programmers on the idea that it could remain difficult past the initial learning stage. Notably I have never once seen somebody who...
Read more

How to Land Your First Dev Job: Develop Yourself, Market Yourself

-
Image
Image by magnetme from Pixabay In the coding and tech groups I'm in, I see the same question asked over and over by folks who are just learning to code, finishing up a bootcamp, degree, or other training program, or who have been looking for that first job for awhile and not having any luck: "what do I need to do to get my first dev job?" There's a whole ton of info out there on this topic, but it's scattered all over, so I thought I would gather together the best resources I've come across and share them, along with a bit of context, to try and help everybody struggling with or just plain wondering about this. There are a lot  of things you can do to improve your chances of finding a job and hopefully shorten your job search. They are broadly divided into 2 categories: developing yourself and your skills, and marketing yourself and your skills. Note that you don't need to do everything on this list, nor do you need to do it all at once. This is an "...
Read more

Git. The WHAT and WHY Edition.

-
Image
Lately I've seen a lot of new/aspiring developers talk about difficulties learning git . I was confused at first, because there are approximately a zillion git tutorials out there. But then I started really looking at what people were saying AND what all those tutorials contain. The problem is most tutorials start out with "here are a ton of git commands to memorize", and this is not where people are having problems. People are having problems with "what is git, why should I learn it, and what does it look like to use it in a real-life project?", and those questions are largely not answered in all those millions of tutorials. So at the risk of redundancy, I'm going to attempt to address these questions in Yet Another Article About Git. First, I want to make it clear that if you want to be a programmer, any kind of programmer, you need to know git. You just DO. This is the short version of the answer to "why should I learn it?".  The medium length a...
Read more