Month: November 2020

This week not much progress was made on developing our project. We’d like to get some more fleshed out prototypes together soon, but there just wasn’t a lot of work done this last week. It’s not catastrophic if there’s a week here and there where we don’t get much done I don’t think that’s a big deal. Overall I’m pretty confident we’re going to be able to get everything we need to done and hit our milestones. 

Part of the reason why not much was done on the Capstone project this week was there were a lot of projects from other classes all due this weekend. In particular there is a class I am taking CS453 – Scientific Visualization. That involves using an OpenGL library that was custom built by the professor of that class and modifying it according to assignment descriptions. I don’t know if I’ve specifically blogged about that course, but I’ve probably thought about complaining about it before. In addition to the assignments being deeply rooted in some math concepts I’m not familiar with at all. So the class ends up making me feel like in addition to trying to figure out how to navigate and manipulate my professor’s obscure OpenGL library, I’m also trying to teach myself math. This week’s special was differential equations. So really the story of this week’s capstone was just the story of not making much progress in other things as well. I’ve never really spent so much time for so little progress on programs as I have in that course. Nothing went poorly with capstone per se, but it’s frustrating when I take time away from working on capstone to do another class, and I end up not making progress there as well.

Something I learned about this week was just from the discussion board for this class, and that’s the Singleton design pattern. I think I had learned about this in my software design course, but that was more theory and never something I had put in practice. I think at the time I didn’t even know what I would use that for or really why it needed a specific name. My previous view was that I would always just create a class as normal and have one instance and in that case it was more flexible anyway in case multiple instances were needed. But if I’m understanding everything correctly, the whole point is the inflexibility. The post from the discussion board discussed its uses while multithreading which is a concept I’m more familiar with, but not enough so that I could make particular use of the singleton design pattern while using it. What made more sense to me was using it to track persistent data in Unity and other permanent states. We could create that object right off the bat and then not really worry about having to track it for its entire life. 

As an overall reflection of the term, I feel like it’s been going very fast. It’s already the beginning of week 7 which means only four more weeks left of actual lectures to attend. Next term I will be online 100% so I’m excited for that. The on campus courses that are being taught remote I feel suffer a lot when they simply try to recreate the environment of being in person. In my opinion it’s impossible to simulate that experience on Zoom so they should just lean into teaching it like a remote class with a little bit of in person flavor, such as break out rooms or presentations.

This week I learned a lot about containers and especially kubernetes. It’s odd that Chrome’s spellchecker doesn’t recognize the word, but anyway this was my first introduction to using containers at all. It was a project of deploying several raspberry pis for a contact tracing program and they are running on a Docker swarm. I understand I said I learned about kubernetes especially, but that’s because the guy who set up the swarm and taught me how to do that also said I should learn Kubernetes because it’s the future of everything. Which is kind of cryptic but it led me to a lot of really interesting research. It’s not something that would be used for my project, but there are a lot of projects at work that would be great to use containers on and especially to help with documentation and reproducibility. Based on a lot of things I’ve taken over that have zero documentation I’ve been making it a priority lately with all my work to document it in a way that someone could take it over from square one and be able to rebuild it exactly as I’ve set it up. There have been a couple “mystery servers” that I’m not really sure what they do but I also can’t touch them for fear of bringing a lot of systems down. It’s a nightmare.

As far as feedback for this course goes, overall I’ve been very happy with the course. I enjoy that the writing is geared towards a professional environment and I feel like when I’m writing I am doing so with a professional audience in mind. The feedback for each paper have reinforced this and overall I feel I am growing as a writer. It’s also nice getting feedback on discussion boards and blog posts. Even though this is an online course, the feedback makes it feel like there’s some more interaction than turning in work and just getting a grade for it. Being 100% remote for school has made things feel much less interactive than in the past, but these are some things that help.