checkpoint

This is just a quick little blog post to serve as a checkpoint update. I've been quite busy with school and other facets of life. Unfortunately this has led to a lack of progress on personal projects and other goals that I've set for myself. This doesn't mean no progress, just slow progress. I'd like to go over some of the things I've been working on recently, despite most of them not being complete yet.

In my Programming Language classes, we recently just started learning Rust. This is a language that I've wanted to check out for a while, but never really gotten around to it. So far, I've been quite enjoying it. To learn it a little bit better, I took the typical path of rewriting TXTMET, a C command line utility that I made a while back. Overall, it wasn't really as difficult or as time consuming as I thought it would be. I've heard of a lot of scary stories about Rust, but I think for a beginner project like this, it was quite manageable. I'm excited to keep learning more about Rust and potentially using it for future projects.

This semester has also been a very busy team project semester. I'm taking 3 computer science classes, and all 3 of them have team projects. Each project that I am working on is quite different from the others, which has been a nice change of pace.

In Operating Systems, we are using C and PintOS to create a simple operating system. This class and project has been very useful in understanding how things work at such a low level. So far, we've implemented threading and scheduling. We are currently working on implementing user programs.

In Programming Languages, are building a small game. We were allowed to choose our own language, my partner and I decided to learn C#. The game we're required to make is a simple input and output guessing game. The hard part has been implementing a custom language as well as our making our own custom lexer and parser.

Lastly, in Databases, we are building a complete web application using Flask, PostgreSQL, Ollama, and NodeJS. My team and I are building a finance tracking application that allows users to get harsh truths about their spending habits using AI. This project has been quite fun, as I've been able to learn more about web development and working with databases.

One other personal project that I've been working on is a tip calculator android app using Java. I started working on this to learn what it takes to develop apps on android. I've been using Android Studio and mostly just been stumbling around and trying to figure things out as I go. So far, the core of the app and the UI is done, it just needs a few more features and some polishing before it's ready to be released. I fully intend to release it on the Play Store once it's done. This is something that I am very excited about, as I've never released an app before and I think it will be a great learning experience.

Overall, I feel like the last few months have been extremely fruitful in terms of learning and growth. Although I haven't been able to make as much progress on personal projects as I would like, I am still learning a lot and making progress in other areas. Also, my progress on those personal projects is still happening, just at a slower pace. One other important thing to note, is that I graduate in just about 1 months time. I'm very excited to see what the future holds and to continue learning and growing as a developer. That is all for now. Until next time!