The Project
This project (looking at Big Data for SCA), was the most daunting project I have come across once it was fully explained to me. I didn’t know loads about encryption or big data, only bits and pieces. I didn’t know how to use the toolchain we decided on, I didn’t know a lot. Over the last 10 weeks I’ve learned more in a short amount of time, more than I thought I could; just in this last week I am finally feeling like I have a grasp on the project as a whole. For v0.0.2 we are starting to implement some basic parts of the library, so that we can spend more time optimizing our solution in the future. Overall, I am excited to learn more in actually developing this project till it is completed in the coming year.
Jobs
At the beginning of this term I was applying for jobs and I am happy to announce that following graduation I have been offered an Associate Software Engineering position at a company called Liberty IT here in the UK. It is nice to have some recognition and reward for all the work I put into this degree. To anyone on the job hunt best of luck!
Tech
In my learning for this project I am working with h5py, hdf5 files, and numpy. Numpy was a technology I had heard of but never actually got to using, so it has been nice to expand my knowledge base in that regard. Learning hdf5 has been a learning curve, but h5py makes it easier. The most challenging part will not be so much the technologies but optimizing in our library.
Life
Have you ever been so stuck on a problem that you spent all day in a debugger only to realize you typed ‘j’ instead of ‘i’? — Me too. My advice to anyone taking computer science classes, or developing in general, is to get up. When you’re stuck on a problem, get up and come back to it fresh eyes. I’ll go for a walk or get a coffee or snack, which ever it is it lets me come back to the problem and solve it in less time than staring at a debugger for hours.
