Schedule Changes!

Some of you may or may not know that my schedule has been really messed up this semester. I started with 4 courses, one of which was Real-Time. I switched CO 480 (History of Mathematics) for CS 456 (Networks), because history of math was really interesting, but a lot of work. I am currently sitting in on the course though. Steven Furino, the history professor, is a very interesting person to listen to.

Then I realized that taking 4, fourth year CS courses including RT was stupid. Some of my friends in RT were only taking 2-3 other classes, all bird-y like History of Film. When I realized that 4 CS courses was silly, I dropped Distributed.

Then the weekend came. RT A0 was due Monday, and I spent most of my spare time in the RT lab. This is after spending 5-10 hours in there per day since the first day of classes. >_<  I got most of A0 done, which was rewarding, I guess.

While Real-Time is very interesting and satisfying, the amount of work is unreal. It's sort of hard to convey. I suspect that it's more work than I did in all of first and second year combined. I could do the course, but I would have to give up literally everything else in my life, including other classes (and sleep!). I am also more interested in the material in my other courses (especially Networks/Distributed) than the Real-Time material. It  seemed weird that I would miss out of learning that material for a subject that I didn't really care about in the first place. I didn't think it was worth it, so I dropped Real-Time.

Instead of Real-Time, I decided to pick up Distributed (again) and UI. Unfortunately UI was full, so I only got into Distributed.

So my final schedule, after 2 weeks of shuffling and being on wait lists, is Architecture, Networks, and Distributed.

I would have liked to take 4 courses, but it feels sort of nice to take only 3. I will pretty much treat this as a summer vacation. :P I could use a break, and I'd like to have time to actually enjoy summer for the first time in 3 years. I also have REAP, so I'll still be busy enough, but after that week of real-time, my other course loads seem pretty light.

I am a little sad about dropping Real-Time, but I'm also very relieved. I will actually learn stuff in my other courses now, and enjoy my semester. I think that I made the right choice.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a sushi date with the Girl.

Start Of The Term

The term started yesterday, and things are already getting busy. I think my blogging frequency is going to be much, much lower this semester. :/

The first Real-Time assignment is out, and it's very intimidating: 7 days to create a command line interface for the trains, including real-time displays for a lot of data about the train system. All this without an operating system. This is going to be a hell of a semester. Lessons learned so far:
1) makefiles suck
2) operating systems are useful

I changed my schedule a little. For one, I dropped History of Mathematics. Although it seems very interesting, I don't think that I could handle the work load with RT. Apparently the course involves a lot of researching and writing. I will however, sit in on the class. Listening to Steven Furino lecture is a pleasure, and I have a lot of time to kill between classes on those days. I also might pick up Networks. I'm currently on the waiting list for it, but I don't know if I actually want to take 4 courses or not. I've heard that networks is a pretty easy course, so we'll see.

The first REAP meeting is today too. I'm looking forward to meeting the whole team. I'm also looking forward to playing with these Microtiles. I watch about an hour long training video on them yesterday, but that's not as fun (or educational) as actually playing with them.

Looks like this will be a very busy, but fun, semester!

Spring!

Yesterday was my last day at Karos Health. It was an excellent term with amazing people, and innovative software and technology. I'll definitely miss working there. They gave me a remote controlled helicopter as a parting gift.

How cool is that!










In other news, I'm quite excited to start my next semester. It'll be my first Spring school semester, and I hear the campus is awesome this time of year. I'll try to enjoy as much of it as I can with Real-Time. :P I will be taking:
- Software Design & Architecture
- History of Mathematics
- Real-Time Programming
- Distributed Systems


Should be a fun semester. :) I found out that one of my co-workers taught my 
Distributed Prof. :P


I also have REAP next semester, which should help me meet my excitement quota for 
the semester.


In other news, the Ignite Waterloo for Spring has been announce. I went to the one in Winter,
 and it was excellent! I highly recommend that you check it out, if you get the chance.

Life Dilemma #8

Today was FedEx day at work. Basically, It's a free day (24 hours) to work on whatever you want. The motto is "Deliver Overnight", hence the name. I started by playing with SmartGWT, a very comprehensive GWT framework. Check out their showcase. It's pretty impressive. Has anyone ever used it before? I'd love to hear your thoughts. At some point I took a break from SmartGWT and helped a colleague work on the software the validates the software licenses. That was a very interesting and different project. I feel sorry for the compiler that had to compile the code I produced. There was some effort to obfuscate the code. It was a fun project, but I feel dirty for violating every coding practice I've ever learned. :P

This last week got me thinking about what I want to do next co-op term. Working at Karos Health has been an amazing opportunity. I enjoy working with all my co-workers, and I have a lot of fun at work. The people are all very passionate and skilled at what they do, so it's a real pleasure to work with them. There's a lot of support for professional development. For one, everyone at the company seems immensely talented, so just working with everyone on a daily basis provides a lot of opportunity for learning. On top of that, the company invests a lot in professional development in the form of lunch and learns, book clubs, and trips to various UX and Agile P2P meetings. The actual software that we build is also very cool. We are coming out with products that don't exist in the market yet! It's very exciting stuff.

The dilemma is whether or not I want to go back there for my next co-op term. I think co-op is really awesome because you get a chance to work for up to 6 different organizations, all with different people, using different tools, and in different business markets. This is an incredible learning opportunity. I thought that I would learn more if I were to work somewhere else, but now I'm not so sure. I'll certainly get a chance to work with a brand new group of people, but I don't know if it's worth leaving such a fun job behind. If I do go back to Karos, I would like to work on server-side code. If I do that, I would be able to work with a (slightly) different group of people in the company, and use different tools. I guess I'll have to think about this a lot more in the upcoming months. I guess this isn't really a bad dilemma to have.


In other news, I got an offer for a UW REAP position today. I am very excited to work on that project next semester. It will be an incredibly busy semester with Real-Time, but it should be one of the most interesting semesters so far. I'm excited (and scared).

UW REAP

Now here's something cool: UW REAP.

Basically, companies give students an opportunity to find new, innovative uses for their technology. Students do it as a part time job on top of their course load. Not only do the students get great experience working with very cool technology and companies, they also get paid! The program also contains project management training for the students. Getting this sort of hands-on experience in industry is invaluable for students.

I think it's a fantastic opportunity and I'm really happy to see Waterloo do something like this. I will definitely be applying for next semester. My only concern is doing this with Real-Time. :S

More on GWT

I've been using GWT for over a month now at work. It really saves time when it comes to creating AJAX applications because it handles so much for you. For example, it can handle page transition and history very gracefully for you. It also has support for things like RPC and using JSON data.

However, if you are building an application that needs to be heavily styled, GWT might not be your best choice. First, the selection of GWT widgets are quite limited. Last time I checked, they only had 20ish standard widgets. Although there seem to be plenty of 3rd party widgets, I am unimpressed with their general quality and documentation. To make things worse, styling GWT widgets is a more complicated because not everything gets translated to native HTML tags. Some of the widgets are implemented as nested divs, and this certainly seems to make styling much harder. In general, the HTML output of GWT code is less clean than hand-coded HTML. At work, I had to take the style sheets made by the designer and try to apply them to the GWT-generated HTML and it was sort of a pain. I think part of the problem is that I'm not a web designer by any means. I had to basically (re)learn HTML and CSS. :/

In other news, course enrollment is tomorrow. I am currently pre-enrolled in CS 452: Real-time, but I don't know if I want to do it or not. The course load is ridiculous, but you learn a lot. If I do choose to take it, I would be able to take 4 courses that term thanks to Arts 304 this semester. Unfortunately, next semester in the only time I can take it for the rest of my academic career. :/