Hey all

A lot has changed since the last time I posted. I still have not heard back from Dell yet for the position, but on the bright side, I did get an offer from National Instruments! If everything goes according to plan, I will be a Software Engineering intern at NI based in Austin, and I will be working on the software for multifunction devices. I’m so thankful for this opportunity and I am looking forward to learning a lot over the summer!

In other news, NCAA basketball is crazy. It’s so unpredictable and teams play with so much heart but… I find it really boring. I understand the talent level isn’t as high as it is in the NBA, but it’s just not that fun to watch a lot of outside passes to a contested 3… I know that it sort of is like stereotyping, but every time I have watched a college game, that’s all it’s been. It seems more like “team basketball” but it’s just not very exciting for me. Also, all the Texas teams are out in the first round, so maybe that’s why it’s not so exciting for me…

Anyways, I’ve been making some good progress on the roommate app. I’ve added in password resets and account activation via email, and programming is just fun again. I feel like I’m cheating a little as I’ve been using the Rails tutorial to model everything, but I am learning a lot from it and it’s only a matter of time until the base features are complete and I can just add whatever I want. I really hope to get a prototype out and running by the summertime, that way I have time to add more stuff to it over the summer.

As you can tell by the title, Spring Break is almost over (sad), which means it’s back to the daily grind soon. I’ve had a good time relaxing a lot, but it just feels like I didn’t do anything… at all. I mean, that’s completely fine, but I hope it doesn’t come back to haunt me as I go back to school. Anyways, here’s to finishing out the semester strong! I hope.

It’s been awhile since I last posted.

I’ve been very busy the last few weeks, and I haven’t really been able to work on things that I really wanted to work on, like the Roommate App and other programming ventures.

Anyways, as you can tell by the title, I had an interview with Dell… yesterday. It was an interesting experience without technical questions, but I feel like it went well and I feel very excited for my chances. I was asked about things that were on my resume, and I talked about my ideas for the Roommate App specifically. I talked about my experiences with Test-Driven Development and also talked a lot about my past experiences developing and testing software. I was then asked about my experience working with a team.. and that was pretty much the entirety of the interview. Overall it went well I would say, but now I’m just waiting for an offer.

The Roommate App is an idea that I had when encountering problems with organization and management of the needs of many different people in one living situation. For instance, a problem we faced was remembering what we all owed each other (because generally one person would pay for a bill, buy a necessity, etc.), so we used a white board to keep track of this. Although it isn’t a tedious task to simply write numbers down and perform simple math, I thought, “Hey, why not just make an app for all of this? It’s great experience to apply my new knowledge of Rails” and boom, the concept was born.

I already assumed that there would be apps like this in existence, but I can’t simply not create because something exists. If I thought like that, and if everyone else in the world thought like that, then no one would even exist! (I hope you get that joke and I hope that was a good joke. (Sorry I’m tired after working on the app for the last 3 hours))

Anyways, so far I have been following the Ruby on Rails Tutorial in order to make sure that my functionality works and everything correctly and because I have little to no experience with front end, so I’m stealing theirs for now until I get better at it.

I feel like this app could have some potential to actually be used by other people than just the inhabitants at my apartment, but if it doesn’t then that’s still okay because of the invaluable experience I would get from developing it. Either way, I hope to demo this project (in the form of a video) by the end of the semester. I decided on Electrical Engineering as my major because I wanted to help people by making their lives easier by automating processes that are otherwise tedious. I hope that this will be a step in the right direction.

It’s 80 degrees outside

It’s January 27, 2015. And it’s also 80 degrees outside.

I just came back from my lab for Digital Logic Design, and to be honest, the post from last night was my response to the lab. Basically I had secretly panicked a bit because of some constraints and a complicated circuit, but it turns out that all of that was unnecessary because I didn’t read the instructions correctly. Go figure.

Today I learned that “No greater than 11” includes the number 11. Had I thought about that yesterday, I would’ve maybe saved about 3 hours of heartbreak. I also learned that checking the temperature is probably a good thing. I mean look at this:

Oh well. I think that, if anything, this just goes to show that I should prepare more for things.

In other news, there’s this sculpture that was put up near the Engineering buildings during Winter Break, and it’s rather infamous on social media. A lot of people pass by and pull out their phones to take a picture of it… but maybe not for the right reasons. Reactions range from “What is this?” to “This is hideous” to “I make art like this every morning, UT should pay me.” Maybe I’ll take a picture and put it up here too. My reaction though? It was a great source of shade on a pretty hot day.

Year 2. Semester 2.

Things only get harder from here. As an Electrical Engineering student, “harder” isn’t something that I really look forward to. Maybe “more challenging” is more of a glass half full approach, but even with this mindset, the thought of my workload expanding like e^x lingers in the back of my mind.

As you can tell by the title of this post, I know that labs are and will be parts of my classes for the rest of my college career. That’s totally fine. I mean, you only learn by doing, right? I only wish that I had a better experience regarding labs, and as someone who has potential aspirations in research, that is kind of scary that I still have lab-phobia. I really hope that in the future when I re-read my posts, I will be able to look back and say that now that I have completed it, it wasn’t so bad - that I learned a lot and came out a better, stronger person!

But that’s in the future. Until then, though, I’ll be here. Building circuits that I only hope will work.

Cheers!