The class is over! And with it, this blog. What follows are my thoughts on this class as a whole. It’s been a hell of a ride.

What did I do this past week? My partner and I finished the final project, Life. I also finished my final Government exam.

What did I do this past week? It’s been a busy one. Let’s count off:

What did I do this past week? I finished up the Darwin project. At first I thought the “no getters and setters” rule would be difficult to sustain, but some critical thinking led to a clever (and mostly effective) design.

Happy 50th Anniversary, UTCS! During the evening banquet, I spoke with a UTCS alum who had graduated in 1984 when Dijkstra just entered the university. Wow!

Hello from HackTX! It’s been a long day. I worked on a goofy little web app that tells you how much an article title is clickbait. It’s backed by a machine learning prediction model based on training data that I manually collected from Buzzfeed (clickbait) and other actual news sources (not clickbait), and some heuristics that I came up with like word count, includes profanity, and whether it starts with a number. Some of the source code is available here. It’ll stay up for 30 days while I still have a free Azure trial.

What did I do this past week? I worked on the Allocator project. The bulk of the work has been done; now it’s just a matter of writing tests and documentation, which shouldn’t take too long, if our code performs as it should.

What did I do this past week? I studied for the OOP exam and took the OOP exam. I watched the Vice Presidential debate. I had an interview. There’s only a couple of companies left on my radar; one of which has offered to fly me out again in a few weeks. Which means I’ll have to miss another quiz. Sorry Professor.

What did I do this past week? I just finished up my onsite interviews with Dropbox, at their San Francisco office! Wow!

What did I do this past week? Career Fair! Recruiting! Interviews! Resumes for days! I printed out around 50 copies, and gave away about 40 of them. Some companies responded quickly (one of which very quickly), others I’m stil waiting on.

What did I do this past week? What a week! I spent my time studying for a Government exam last Thursday, attending student organization meetings and corporate events, and applying for jobs. I’ve already scheduled a few interviews from online applications, so my job search has been going well so far. Protip: Most recruiters at the Career Fair will simply tell you to apply online anyway, so it never hurts to do it beforehand.

What did I do this past week? As expected, another busy week for me. I turned in my OOP project a couple days early, only to join in on the stress of other students as they discovered failing Travis builds and asked questions that made me go back and check my submission. I knocked out my Compilers project. I read a lot of Government. I applied for jobs. I administrated my organizations. Last night my old PintOS team reunited and stayed up late to compete in the annual 2016 NSA Codebreaker Challenge.

What did I do this past week? This week has been a busy one. In OOP land, I’ve made a surprising amount of progress with the Collatz project. I’ve written a lot of code, read about a lot of technologies, and resolved a lot of those GitHub issues. Most of my other spare time was spent on extracurricular activities - leading student organization kickoffs (ISSS, MAD) and meeting with eager and curious freshmen. Job hunting (internship hunting) has also officially started - I’ve polished up my resume and have begin passing it around to recruiters.

What did I do this past week? It’s been a surprisingly dense first week of class! This week was the classic “Hello World” (or actually “Nothing to see here.”) in C++, alongside some C++ features (operator overloading!), a comparison to Java (functions vs. methods), and a tour of Google Test. I’ve got a fresh Ubuntu VM ready for the class. I’ve only ever used Docker in a UNIX environment, so I’ve decided to avoid the Windows route, for now (though I may fall back if it’s too slow). Also, I got this blog stood up.

Hello, Jekyll! A new blog is born. (This is a test post.)