Summer!!!

Now that I have completed all my exams, it’s summer time! Well, not quite summer summer but at least summer term is around! This also means, my co-op work term starts next Monday! Ahh! I can’t believe that once again, I am out of school for 8 months. Most of my best friends in CS are all on co-op work terms so I guess this means we’ll have tons of time to meet up this Summer! Fortunately for one of my friends, Bessie, the travel advisory for Japan has been lifted and now she’ll be heading for her work term in Japan in 3 weeks!

So what have I been doing in the last week since exams have been over? I’ve been working on redoing the layout of my website and been reviewing stuff on C++ and PDF. With my website, instead of using tables, I’m working on CSS this time. I’ve never used CSS other than some minor tweaks while I was working on ReviewBoard. It’s not very hard to learn but when you need it to do exactly what you want, it can be difficult sometimes. I ran into some major layout problems when I resize my browser. After spending hours to make things stretch when resizing to an odd dimension, I found a quick fix of making minimum heights and widths so things don’t overlap when the dimensions get small. I’m enjoying this learning process but hopefully I’ll get the new site up soon.

On Easter weekend, I went down to Eugene, Oregon for the Conference Championships ultimate tournament with UBC. It was a long car ride but at the same time, I enjoyed it. We played great in 2 games but I’m looking forward to the team being even better at regionals. It’s somewhat silly to play this tournament since it didn’t make a big difference to the upcoming regionals. I really hope my team will qualify for nationals this year!

I’ve been also watching a lot of hockey lately as well. Of course, I’ll be cheering for the Canucks but hopefully they won’t give me a heart attack every game. Game 7 between the Nucks and Blackhawks was much more than I can take. I’m not so excited about having Nashville as the Canuck’s next opponent. They’re pretty boring in terms of how they usually sit back and wait for mistakes to occur. It’s amazing how much life is brought into the city from hockey. I hope the Canucks keep rolling! I want to wear my Canucks jersey for the next bit.

ReviewBoard recap

Crystal blogging twice in 2 hours? No way! Well… actually this was written 2.5 weeks ago and it was supposed to be posted on to the UCOSP blog. That didn’t happen or it might be posted later, so instead of potentially wasting my effort of writing that blog, let me post it on my blog!

Time has flown by!

I can’t believe there’s only 2 weeks left in this term. Unfortunately,
this also means that it’s almost time to wrap up loose ends for this
term. I have had such a pleasant experience working with the mentors
and interacting with other groupmates that I am feeling a little sad
that this term is about to be over. However, I am hoping to continue
with my task after this term is over. For those wondering, I am a
third year UBC student majoring in Computer Science.

While others have wrote about what they have done for this term, I’ll
talk more about my experience being a UCOSP student. When I first
received an email from UBC Computer Science explaining about the UCOSP
program, I was really excited about all the possibilities. After
sending in a brief application, I got accepted into the program and I
had to choose a project. When I looked through all the projects,
ReviewBoard definitely looked the most appealing to me due to the fact
that I have never really worked with Python and Django looked really
interesting. Before this project, I have only coded in java, C++, C
and C# and have done testing in my co-op work terms. I didn’t know
what to expect out this program but the chance of getting to work on
an open source project and getting credit for school were too good to
pass up.

One of the coolest part of UCOSP is the opportunity to meet up with
your groupmates across the country. I honestly did not know what to
expect at the code sprint in Edmonton. Before the code sprint, I spent
lots of time trying to figure out how ReviewBoard works but I did not
find much success. During the code sprint, the best part was how we
were all working together to solve very simple problems due to the
fact that we were very new to the project. This definitely brought the
group together even though we had very little time together. One of
the funniest fact about the sprint was that all of the our mentors
besides Kevin were unable to come to Edmonton, so we spent lots of on
IRC. While other rooms were busy chatting away, our room was dead
silent while we were talking on the IRC the entire time. While IRC
meetings can not truly replace a face to face conversation, I
definitely had a more positive experience than I believed at first.
Being restricted to IRC for communication has definitely improved my
way to communicate with my fellow groupmates and mentors.

For my project, I am working on a quick search feature that uses the
autocomplete widget. It’s actually pretty simple but it took much
longer than I thought because I was so green. One of my major
struggles at the beginning was not reading good tutorials. I had some
issues trying to find a good Django tutorial when the entire time, the
Django book, was available to me. I definitely struggled when I had no
idea why things would work. The next time when I join in on a complete
new project, I will definitely take some more time to find proper
tutorials to get a solid understanding. Christian was able to give me
very good advice on how to approach this project. After that, I took
some time and organized it into parts to complete. Luckily, I did not
run into too much road blocks that stalled me for long periods of
time. But for the start of each part, it took a lot of time to figure
out how to do approach the code. It was a pretty big hill to climb
each time but I felt the most important thing was to keep trying and
know how to ask smart questions. I definitely felt happy at the end of
every single time I accomplished something! I’m pretty sure I’ll be
able to finish this quick search project. In the mean time, I am
starting a new project on issue tracking. I don’t think I’ll get that
done in time but hopefully I’ll be able to continue on with this
project during Summer while I’m out for another co-op work term.

All in all, I’m very happy with my decision of joining UCOSP and
ReviewBoard. If you are a prospective student reading my entry by any
chance, definitely give it a thought! A huge thanks to my mentors,
Christian, David, Mike and Kevin for being so patient with me and
giving me such good guidance. Also, without UBC faculty Thomas and
Megan and UCOSP committee, I would not have this awesome experience.
Thank you so much everyone!

- Crystal

Uh oh! Haven't posted in a while!

Oops… School and ultimate took over and I realized I haven’t blogged in about 4 weeks! The past 4 weeks have been really hard and I am almost through. Let me somewhat recapped what happened. After coming back from Stanford and my consistent battle of trying to get ahead in school work, I felt pretty tired. Unfortunately (or fortunately), 2 weeks after Stanford, Centex came along which didn’t help. For those that don’t know, Centex is a tournament in Austin, Texas. Austin’s weather was pretty amazing during my time there but that was definitely not the weekend to run away to another tournament. The week before that, I spent every night trying to finish and get ahead in school work and I basically burned myself out. I spent every day stressing out to get things done and often forgetting to eat and working well past my bed time. Sometimes, I found myself working till 3am in the morning without realizing time and I am for sure going to work even harder (as if I don’t work hard enough at organizing) to make my life is in order. One thing I know for sure is that I will never take 5 courses with Ultimate and work again. To save some money, some of my teammates and I chose to fly out of SeaTac airport but I felt that only added more stress and time wasted which didn’t really help me. Battling a shorter roster, my team as a whole played a lot, succeeded at most aspects but most importantly gained very valuable experience as a team.



Being silly at Austin's capitol building!

Upon returning to Vancouver, I was mostly ahead of my school schedule but spending an entire weekend running around and having had the extra stress of travelling really didn’t help me. I had time to do homework and other stuff but I was mentally too tired to do anything. At that point, I had loose ends to wrap up for ReviewBoard and that took up a lot of time. Overall, I still really enjoyed my experience with ReviewBoard but the last week of the term wasn’t so fun. I had some code reviews which took a little too long, a presentation and a screencast to do.

My screencast of the features that I have done.

Reviewboard was fun and I definitely want to spend more time on it. There’s definitely a lot more than can be done!

So after all that, more assignments and projects are done but those are over. I definitely enjoyed CPSC 320 a lot more than I thought. I finished 2 exams so I only have 1 more to do. Not too bad! This term has been a real challenge at balancing everytime and I’m definitely looking forward to a slightly chiller summer. I’ll be off on a co-op work term at PdfTron (so excited!) and I’m looking forward to doing more development work outside of school. I hope I’ll blog again sometime real soon!