Finishing My Third Year and Summer Projects
I’m officially done with my third year of college. Six semesters completed, and only one more to go before I graduate. This year’s definitely been the most interesting, fun, packed, and memorable year of my college experience thus far. Every single year has been a new adventure but this one has been my favorite. I’m at the tail end of my college experience and it’s bizarre to realize that. It’s bizarre to realize that although it felt like just yesterday I was applying for college, today I’m at the doorstep of graduating.
My first year was characterized by naivete and new experiences, new adventures, and a new home. My second year was characterized by struggle, self-realization, identity, and redemption. My third year was characterized by new friends, hard work, perseverance, love, laughter, and happiness. I can positively say that one year ago, I would not have imagined myself here today. I’m still struggling with depression and anxiety – sure – but I can say for certain that my life today is happier than one year ago. I can say for certain that I’m surrounded by people who I care about and who care about me, that my ambitions and plans for the future are becoming more and more realized, and that I’m more certain of the person who I am and the person who I want to be.
In a few weeks, it’ll be June. For the entire month of June, I’ll be primarily occupied with my position at Summer Youth Academy (Brown Youth Academy). I’m excited to be making a real, positive impact again on the lives of the youths we’ll be serving. During downtime, in the mornings, at nights, and on Sundays, I’ll be working on my own passion projects while I’m off the clock. After June, I’ll be able to work on my own passion projects full-time until school starts again late August – the fall semester, my final semester.
Some projects I want to work on this summer, in no particular order:
Amelior!
Amelior! (short for ameliorate: to make better) is a health app that I worked on with a team of colleagues this past semester. Amelior helps users keep track of their health goals and incentivizes them to cultivate their gardens through the usage of digital social actors that they may become invested in. We’re essentially taking what made Neopets and Tamagotchis so addicting and using them to make users’ lives better.
This project’s proof-of-concept and general design are done, and all we need is to rewrite it to be production-ready for Android devices as well as write an iOS port for Apple users, and then publish to both the Google Play Store and App Store so that it can be downloaded.
Complex Scheduler
I’d like to finish and formalize an algorithm I first thought of about a year ago, including accounting for edge cases, sorting out the mathematics, perhaps calculating the time complexity (if able), and completing an implementation in C. I’d like to self-publish my findings here on my website as well as the implementation on GitHub so that all may use it for free.
GitHub Contribution Graph Pixel Art
Something I recently learned is that it’s actually rather easy to fake commit dates. I’d like to create a program that allows users to make pixel art out of their GitHub contribution graphs. In theory, this isn’t too difficult. Perhaps a web front-end to allow users to draw pixel art as they desire, generating a shell script they can then run and push to their accounts.
EDIT: turns out, there’s already a project that does this called Gitfiti.
Instant Rice
I’m a bit proud of the name for this one, an attempt at humor. Instant Rice is what I call an upcoming project that allows users to easily rice out their systems after a minimal installation of Arch Linux. My significant other and I had some talk about making Linux rices since she’s much more artistically-capable than I am while I have tons of experience with Linux. The goal is to be able to download a single script after installing Arch Linux, run it, and then have our riced out operating system. There will be scripts to customize as well so you can have different variants of our rice.
This project will also be an opportunity for us to slip in as many rice and food jokes as possible.
nginx Analytics Engine
nya! unfortunately didn’t work out last summer, so I’d like to try it again this summer. It really just stems from my own need to understand my web traffic more deeply than just a simple visitor count digest. I’m thinking of writing it in Rust since I’d like to learn Rust and this is the perfect opportunity for me to try it out (for the daemon, at least). Maybe I should give it a new name, too.
Pacman Digest
Alright, I’m also a bit proud of the name for this one. Pacman Digest is a program I’m currently working on that helps understand packages installed and managed with pacman, Arch’s default package manager. Nothing too fancy. Maybe a chart or two and a few numbers. I really just want to understand package usage, which ones take up the most space, dependency trees, and the like. The goal is to have a single program you can run that creates a portable HTML file with everything container, which users can then view with a web browser to understand their system.
Lots of stuff coming up this summer.
Happy hacking!