Website Reboot

It’s a new year… Hard to imagine it’s been almost half a year when I decided that I wanted to do a proof of concept on this website. Of course, school happened and other things and I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do with this so I just left it as is.

Now that it’s summer and that I didn’t go ham looking for internships (read: I applied to 4 pretty prestigious companies and didn’t get into any), I’ve decided to reboot this since I don’t have very much work. Plus, I do need to at least show that I’m doing something during the summer, and I’ve always wanted my little corner of the internet– social media is just too intimidating.

Recap so far

1. The first 3 or 4 weeks of the summer I studied abroad in China with a class from USC. Although he’ll probably never read this blog, Professor Sheehan is probably one of the most amazing professors I’ve met. Part of it is because unlike most professors, he actually reaches out and engages the students on a personal level. Usually it takes many conversations for the student to try connect with the professor, but it’s really nice being able for the professor to initiate. For me, I have trouble with this sort of thing, so there it is. Furthermore, I made friends who I would never have met, namely IR majors. Since IR/politics is pretty interesting and anyone who tries hard enough can get into consulting, it leaves me a possible path if I ever get bored of CS.

2. Additionally, I’ve started trying to coordinate USC’s very own USiL (Undergraduates Students in Linguistics). Currently, a beginning of the school year mixer is in the works. I’m also trying to create/plan/mashup some technical skill lessons for workshops during the school year. Hopefully, everything will come through. It would be very cool to make a very rigorous linguistics undergrad experience because I’ve heard of other schools that are supposed to be infinitely harder than SC.

3. Lastly, I’ve been working on a game of BlackJack in Pharo. Pharo is a Smalltalk dialect that uses the same VM that Smalltalk does. For those who don’t know what Smalltalk is, it was one of the first, if not the first, programming language where OOP was the center of the programming language. Smalltalk revolves around the VM. Smalltalk’s VM can interact with the exterior computing environment, but the essence of programming in Smalltalk is creating objects in the VM that interact with each other through messages. This is analogous to Java’s classes and methods, but it is more prohibitive than Java, allowing for an even more OOP focused things. The conception behind Smalltalk was the internet, which is really fascinating… Objects in Smalltalk are analogous to computers on a network.

   Progress: I’ve learned most of the basic concepts of Pharo, probably. I’ve implemented the game (I think)… Right now, I’m implementing the UI of the game, which is quite a bear since there isn’t too much documentation :(. After I’ve implemented the UI and attached all the components, I’ll hopefully have a functioning BlackJack game.

Anyways, I’ve been pretty verbose. Maybe I won’t be as wordy in the future.