Getting there...

Week 7 is over! I’m almost there! With only 6 more weeks to go, I’m telling myself that I can do this!

UCOSP has been going quite well. I’m almost done my quick search feature other than the part where if I click on the suggestion, it should be a link to an URL instead of autocompleting my suggestion. One thing that has amazed so far is git. At first, I thought the learning curve to git was quite challenging and I found it quite frustrating at times. I have always been using SVN and making the transition to git and all the branches was hard. On top of that, I didn’t know how to use gitk properly. When I was using git, instead of doing gitk –all, I did just ‘gitk’ which meant I couldn’t visualize the git branches properly. But now that I got the basic ideas of how to use git, I find it quite amazing to keep a lot of files organized if you know what you’re doing. It seems like these distributed repository systems might be the future.

I don’t have much to talk about this week. The weather has been insane and it snowed yesterday. I’m heading to California next weekend for Stanford Invite and I am seriously hoping for some nice California sunshine. In the mean time, I’ll be very busy trying to get ahead in school work. Hopefully, the next time I blog, I’ll give some good news about Stanford!

Back to school?

Wow! School is right around the corner and I’m proud to announce that I’m on pace to get things done before school starts. Luckily, I don’t have school on Monday so I actually have an extra day off! Not too much happened over this break for me though. I’m mostly interested in getting ahead in school work and spending lots of time working on ReviewBoard. In the past couple of days, I think I spent a lot of time banging my head against the desk while trying to write the wrapper javascript function. It actually wasn’t supposed to be that hard but my lack of experience with javascript and json got the best of me. But, I managed to get everything to work! I can now autocomplete when I type things into the search field! It’s just lacking a bit of user friendliness for the time being.

California in 2 weeks! I’m seriously looking forward to some nice sunshine and it better not rain while I’m there. It’s too bad that my team is not at Pres day in San Diego but I heard that it has been raining hard this weekend. Good luck to the UBC Boys that are there!

Canucks are back winning again! I’m surprised with all the injuries they’ve been having. As much as it’s nice to maybe win the conference or President’s trophy, it’s only the Stanley Cup that matters. I hope they can continue this winning streak into the playoffs!

Reading week!

Yay! I made it to reading week! This is usually something I’m not proud of but with what happened 2 weeks ago when I fell extremely ill, I am very happy that I made it through without crashing to rock bottom. That being said, I am by no means behind but I am very excited to have an opportunity to seriously get ahead! FUN!!! It’s somewhat hard to believe that school is going to be over in 7 more weeks. With that, summer is going to come and I’ll be off for 8 months again for another co-op work term! I’m excited this time around! I talked about this 2 posts ago but I’ll be off to PDFTron for 8 months as a software developer. Their job description was appealing to me in terms that they’re looking for passionate students to contribute to their projects and that’s what really caught my attention. I only have so many work terms and I’m willing to work hard to make the most out of them. The interview with them was definitely positive and excited to see what’s ahead!

ReviewBoard. As much as I enjoy getting the challenge, it’s been a love and hate relationship. For every step I make, like what Steve wrote on the ReviewBoard wordpress blog, it’s a massive hill to climb in order to get any success. (As of today, I’m getting owned by an AutoComplete widget). After some researching, lots of banging head to desk moments, and asking questions, things get better and I start to understand what’s happening and how to proceed with the task I’m trying to accomplish. That’s what you reach the peak and really enjoy the process of contributing to the project. After finishing, I hit rock bottom and start all over again. It’s a never ending cycle! Like what my high school math teacher said, “There’s always more”. So true… Git has been something completely new while working on this project. I’ve got to say, it’s pretty neat! It’s definitely something different compared to SVN that I have been consistently using.

I was looking around on Facebook’s career site and I saw that they have puzzles. Maybe when I have some time, I’ll go solve a couple. What caught my eye was the email address that they provided, {oxFACEBooC>>2 in decmial}@fb.com. So cool! Alright. I’m dead tired and I have practice tomorrow morning. I need some zzz!

BUSY!!!

Wow, I’ve been extremely busy! Balancing everything (school, ReviewBoard and Ultimate) has been insanely challenging! I guess balancing everything will be the theme of this term in order to survive. I’m not behind in any of my school work at all but even trying to stay on par has been hard. I feel like I’m doing school work every chance I get. I guess one thing I can do is to even increase my efficiency at doing work. Aiya! I have posted a small post on the ReviewBoard wordpress but then I found out afterwards that that post isn’t very exciting. If I get the time, I’ll make some changes.

ReviewBoard has been a very rewarding experience so far but yet, it’s been very hard too. (My theme of this post is about hard I guess). I’ve never used Python, Django or RESTful API and other stuff. Git has been tough on me as well. I’m always afraid of making a mistake with it but good thing everything seems to be undone. I’m slowly making progress and I’m hoping to push through and get more done soon. I can’t wait till reading week where I’m going to really get ahead in everything. Muahhahahhaa! I don’t have anything planned for reading week other than doing my work! So fun!!!

Ultimate continues to be exciting in it’s own way. This weekend, I went to the gym with fellow teammates to learn some weight training tips from a trainer. I found out that real squads when you’re doing properly is extremely hard… I had trouble of trying to not fall over. Blah, today is not a good day for blogging; I’m too tired. I’ll blog sometime real soon again.