There’s not much news for me to share with you all, although I wish I did. However, if you’ve been up to date with some of my old blog posts, you must know that I underwent a minor cosmetic surgery last summer. But what you all might not know is that the procedure was performed in India.

I didn’t say this at the time because I was afraid my professors would assume I was on an extended summer break if they had come across my blog, but considering how so many of them don’t even bother checking their inboxes, I’d be surprised if they would even remember my name, much less finding out about my blog.

Well, regardless, the reason I am saying this is because I’m going back to India for a follow-up surgery. It is a small procedure meant to remove a device they put in me to provide some structural support to my face.

The procedure will not cause any noticeable changes to my appearance, and will hopefully be followed by a quick recovery. I’ll be flying back home by the end of the month, allowing me to catch up on my classes without falling too far behind.

Additionally, there is a job fair on my campus in February. I have had my eyes on this event since last November, and I am planning on finishing this online full-stack course I told you all about before I fly back home.

I hope updating my resume with some of the projects I’ve completed to showcase my skills will make me more attractive to the recruiters there.

Whether or not I end up getting a job, setting this deadline for myself can prove to be extremely beneficial since I can spend the rest of my semester working on larger projects with my newfound skills, so I am excited regardless of the outcome.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday. In just a few hours we will enter into 2025!

I’d like to congratulate all those who achieved great things this year! One of the greatest achievements is reaching the end of the year alive and well. For many of us, these holidays can be extremely beneficial for resting and trying to catch up on all the new trends we are noticing in the tech industry.

In case it isn’t obvious, I have resumed my webdev journey. Just a few minutes ago, I published a simple sketchpad on GitHub that allows users to create pixel art. It isn’t anything crazy, but it is a cute little app and I am proud of it! You can check it out here.

So many of my friends are also spending their holidays working on different technical skills. If I didn’t have this excitement of working together and I didn’t know that they were also working I would have thought that I was wasting my holidays. I just hope 2025 is the year I, and all my friends, get exciting opportunities in Co-op internships. If not, at the very least, I hope to fill my resume with as many skills and projects as I can.

My friends are all so hardworking, and I want to express how grateful I am to have the friends I have because they keep me motivated to achieve greater heights! I don’t have many of them following my GitHub, but I’d like to give a shoutout to those who do below, so I suggest all those reading this blog to go ahead and follow them too:

• Adam Rebello
• Anique Ali
• Daniel Yonkeu
• Kshitij

Once again, I’d like to wish all those reading this blog to have a very happy New Year!

Sorry for suddenly disappearing for a month, but I’m finally back! I had to take a sudden break to prepare for my final exams. Now that I’m free for the next 2-3 weeks, I don’t have any excuses to miss any deadlines for publishing new blog posts.

I will continue making updates on my webdev progression as usual. I will also be posting an article soon, describing the scheduling simulator that I had been working on last month for my operating systems course.

The next blog will be posted next weekend as usual, and until then, I wish everyone reading this a very happy Christmas! I hope you all enjoy these holidays with your family and take some well-deserved break from work and school!

Over the last week, my partner and I have made significant progress on our OS assignment. He is mainly responsible for the written part of the assignment. He has a better conceptual understanding of the course, so although I was primarily responsible for the coding part of the assignment, he has helped me debug my code for the scheduler simulator so that it behaves in a conceptually accurate manner.

The second part of the assignment was a little bit of a headache and required us to go to the prof’s/head TA’s office every day to understand if we were on the right track. This part required us to implement a system where 5 processes would be able to run concurrently in an efficient manner.

To solve the critical section problem and the race conditions caused by it, we implemented a basic semaphore acquisition system that resembled the “dining philosophers” problem. We then implemented a protocol that behaved similarly to a bounded waiting system where we made sure that if a process was denied a semaphore the first time, the next time it must be able to acquire that semaphore without fail, further solving issues of livelock and deadlock.

It is a little different approach from most people, as they might usually try to implement Dijkstra’s solution, but math and programming are about problem solving, and each problem can have multiple solutions, so as long as we come up with a solution we are good!

Except for the part 1 report which discusses and compares the scheduling algorithms with each other, I was able to finish off all the coding parts pretty quickly, giving me lots of time to prepare for finals week.

This brings us to our plans for this week:

1. Finish off the Part 1 report from my OS assignment
2. Start revising some material from my OS and RTOS course for the finals week

As you can see, my plans for this week are pretty chill since there’s no high stress work remaining anymore. Hopefully, this will help me fix my sleep schedule again (which I accidentally messed up because of the OS assignment ¯\(ツ)/¯ ).

Another two week break! Sorry about that. A lot has happened since my last post. As I mentioned previously, I have been working on building a scheduler simulator. The program expects a list of processes to run with their trace information as input, does stuff, and then gives us two output files. One shows at what time each process undergoes a state transition, with its old and new state, and the other output file shows at what time a process was allocated/deallocated a memory partition, along with how much total and usable memory space remained in the system.

The difference between the two memory spaces was that the former counted the internal fragmentation within each memory partition. Although that sounds complicated, the solution was much easier than expected. Again, I would love to explain further, but others are working on this assignment, which means I might risk plagiarism accusations if I post my solution on the internet.

Of course, I will do that eventually, with a complete explanation of how the program works, once my course finishes, but until then you all will have to wait patiently! As of last Friday-ish, you could say I have finished that project, with a decent implementation of various scheduling algorithms such as “first come first serve”, “shortest job first”, and “round robin”. I am now only waiting for example outputs from our course professor, after which I can fine-tune my program to behave as expected. However, until then, I can not “fix” my program, if I do not know what is wrong it.

There is a second part to this assignment. We are asked to extend our program to simulate concepts such as concurrency, shared memory and semaphores, which means the final implementation of this program will include two simulators. I recently reviewed the textbook to learn these concepts and have a rough idea of what I am supposed to do. This is what I will be working on over the next week.

This operating systems course is probably the highlight of this semester. I am really enjoying this course and hope all of my readers feel the same by reading my blogs on it. I will hopefully return next Sunday or Monday and continue to give more updates on my progress. Thanks for reading!

It’s been a while since I wrote my last blog post. As much as I’d like to talk about all the great things I’ve done while I’ve been gone, the reality is that the last two weeks haven’t really been that great, to be honest. In fact, It’s been quite stressful and full of bad choices, but that is fine since I have learned from my mistakes.

The most recent assignment given to us in our Operating Systems course has pretty much destroyed whatever love I had for C. I have been trying to recreate the assignment in C++ in the last two days and so far it’s been a much better experience trying to write code that is more efficient and maintainable. At this point, I’m just angry at myself for never using it sooner. There is of course a bit of a learning curve transitioning from C to C++, but what little I have implemented has managed to impress me quite a lot.

Our final assignment makes us use all of the concepts we have learned so far to implement a program that simulates a process scheduler which simply prints a certain output in a certain order based on the type of given input. In layman’s terms, you can think of a scheduler as a traffic policeman who stands at an intersection and manages the flow of traffic to prevent congestion and maintain order. Depending on several factors, he decides which lane has more priority and is allowed to drive, and which lane doesn’t.

In the example of an operating system, the scheduler simply does the same job to decide which process is allowed to run and for how long before it must be interrupted to allow another process to run. Depending on how one may design their scheduler, there may simply be no interrupts and a process can be allowed to run to completion. There are various ways to implement a scheduler that can perform its tasks in different ways.

I’m considering implementing this assignment in C++, and I’d love to talk about it once I complete it. This course has really made me appreciate low-level programming and how computers are built and work at their most fundamental level. I believe information like this can definitely help someone write more efficient code for large projects to improve overall system performance, and I’m really grateful I have access to this information considering how rare it can be to obtain, especially if someone is teaching themselves all of this stuff.

As always, I’m excited to welcome this new week and hope to continue learning new things!

Reading week is finally here, and as always this week has been super hectic. As mentioned in the previous blog, we’ve had two midterms and two assignments. I also had a lab session which I had to miss because of the extremely disorganized exam schedule given to us. But, I won’t complain. The week is finally over and it’s time to relax and catch up to any backlogs and strengthen academic foundations.

I have also been revising HTML/CSS fundamentals over the last 2 days and have been banging my head against the wall trying to make sense of Flexbox. I have finally reached a point where I am confident with the fundamentals, which means I can now tackle the biggest hurdle of my life – JavaScript.

I’ve been trying to practice webdev for a long time so I’m happy that I finally have free time to do so. However, we’re gonna take our time with it and not rush things as I also have to focus on academic coursework as I mentioned earlier.

This week will be really pivotal for me if I catch up to my backlogs; otherwise, I will have to continue struggling until the end of the semester. As such, here’s my plan for the following week:

• Read through lecture slides and assigned textbook for my operating systems course and also start the assignment given to me and my assigned partner for the same course.
• Go through lecture slides for any other course if needed and prepare for my midterms that are scheduled after reading week.
• And obviously, learn the basics of javascript

Just because it’s reading week it doesn’t mean I have to start getting lenient on myself. This week is going to be really busy just like any other week, and I am excited to welcome it!

Welcome to another week. We have two midterms and two assignments, back to back. So fun!

Putting that aside, the past week has been really interesting so far. We are learning about operating systems, and despite my medical leave, I’ve been able to catch up fairly well. I can’t promise that I am perfect in the theory, but it has been interesting to know about how computer systems really work from the inside. The midterm syllabus is fairly simple as well, with the content going over what interrupts are, and how they organize the different processes in an operating system via CPU scheduling, and how you can create (or terminate) more of them. There’s also another midterm for an introductory course to real-time systems which teaches us embedded programming.

These are by no means very difficult courses, but they help to satisfy the curiosity of anyone wanting to learn how computer systems operate at their most fundamental levels. Not to mention, I found an amazing person as my new teammate for my operating systems course, and I am excited to work with him on future assignments after my midterm exams. So far, the past week has been pretty good, and it makes me optimistic for this one.

My plans for this week are as follows:

• Finish off all midterms
• Finish of all assignments/deliverables
• Start practicing webdev again
• Start some projects in the C language to further my understanding and fluency.
• Start working on future assignments.

All in all, it is going to be a pretty busy week, and I hope whoever is reading this is as excited to welcome it, as I am :D

It has been so long since I have written my last blog. So, where have I been? Did I forget about my website? Did I get lazy and break my promise of writing a new blog each week? No, certainly not.

To start off with, I have finally started attending my classes in person after having to stay indoors for basically all of September. As such there was a ton of work to catch up to, to transition back to “normalcy”. I knew I wouldn’t get any time off for myself as a result, but I never expected I would be working non-stop for nearly an entire month. Things are still a little hectic, but at least I have some time to start writing blog posts again. So let’s get to it!

Firstly, the biggest thing that has been on my mind for the last month is this networking event I am planning on attending this week. I don’t have any real work experience, no notable personal projects, and I don’t even have proper dress pants to go with my semi-formal outfit. In fact, I downloaded LinkedIn for the first time today while on the bus! I am so unprepared! However, this is exactly what excites me. Here is me, a dumb college student who knows nothing about the world, about to shake hands with seasoned industry professionals. I may be a nobody, but my presence in this event alone will prove to be extremely beneficial to me as it will expose me to corporate culture for the first time. Who knows, the next time I attend an event like this, my familiarity with how these things work might help me communicate better and actually make networks that stick.

Second on the list is obviously my academic work. There have been a ton of things I have experienced over the last week alone. Professors with an attitude, antisocial teammates that do not communicate properly, dealing with a falling out with said teammates and having to search for new people to team up with, catching up on coursework to prepare for upcoming midterms… it’s… a lot. But, hopefully, once this networking event is gone out of the way, I can go all in on studying for any exams and assignments that might come my way in the next month.

There is also obviously an elephant in the room. My progress with WebDev. How’s that going? Well as much as it is embarrassing to admit, I have yet again failed to continue working on my WebDev journey, and might not make any promises to reverse that for the next two weeks so I can prepare for the midterms I talked about earlier. However, I shall still make efforts to get back into it. If there’s one thing I learned while preparing for this week’s networking event, is that I am very behind most of my peers, and I do not plan on keeping things that way. There are a lot of things different about this semester, I can feel it. I just need a breather, and then I can make a comeback.

I do apologize if this week’s blog post is a little different than usual, but I promise we’ll be back to normal next week. So stay tuned! ;)

It’s been a very interesting last week. Let’s talk about it.

Firstly, my request for a 4th course for this fall semester was accepted. I was able to promptly register for it as soon as I was given permission. So far this course doesn’t seem all that difficult. It reminds me of a probabilities course I took back in Winter. That was a much harder course and I hope it has prepared me sufficiently for the course I am taking right now.

Aside from that, I’m still somewhat afloat with my attempt at staying up-to-date with the other 3 courses I am taking currently. The biggest contributor to this has been the detailed notes I’ve been taking from the lecture slides provided. As for the lab work, I am still trying to coordinate with my TAs as I am having difficulties with the installation and usage of the simulation software / IDEs required. The biggest factor preventing me from doing this is the lack of TAs themselves. Apparently, the TAs for one of my courses haven’t been decided yet, which means I might miss some of my deadlines by the time a TA is assigned for my class. I’m not really sure what I am supposed to do in this situation, but I’ll try figuring something out I guess.

Lastly, I want to be honest in my journey of career and life development, and so as a way to stay accountable, I want to say I haven’t worked on webdev since last week. It’s honestly quite disappointing considering I was very excited coming across a course that would help me get started with this. However, because staying up-to-date with my courses while I am on medical leave is pretty stressful by itself, I haven’t gotten the time to work on any side projects. Hopefully, the coming week should bring me lots of free time to be able to do exactly this.

With that being said, let’s plan what we want to achieve by the next weekend:

Plans for next week:

• Join any lab groups that I haven’t joined yet and figure out a way to work on them remotely. Similarly for any assignments due that need to be completed with a team.
• Try contacting any TAs for help regarding the previous point, and contact a prof directly for the courses whose TAs aren’t assigned yet. Similarly for any help regarding the installation of necessary software / IDEs for such lab work.
• Better manage time so I can set aside more time to practice webdev.

We’ve made it to another week! I may have delayed making an update for a day or two, but it’s the thought that matters. ;)

Continuing from last week’s progress report — I have recovered my campus email address as I said I would, allowing me to contact my professors and other coordinators. This has led to one bad news and one good news.

The thing is, I would usually take 5 courses a semester, but I thought of taking 4 courses this time since I would be focussing on my post-surgical recovery. The bad news is that I’ve applied to my courses late, which is causing me a little difficulty in registering for that 4th course. The worst case scenario would be that I would have only 3 courses this semester, but hopefully, that should not cause any academic disadvantage for me in the future, other than slightly increasing my workload in a different semester.

The good news is that the medical leave I had requested after my surgery has resulted in my professors giving me permission to study and participate in their classes from the comfort of my home. Considering how much time I usually waste in commuting, this would hopefully allow me to better focus on my studies. Aside from this, the following are the previous week’s highlights.

Weekly report:

1. The decision regarding my request for the 4th course has been pending for the whole week.

2. I’ve been permitted to study and work on my labs from home.

3. I have made a small project that scrapes information from a CSV file and projects the information on a graph. Working on this project helped me revise some data analysis skills for the first time in almost 2 years.

   It’s nothing worth showing off, although I hope this has helped me build some foundation for machine learning skills if I ever decide to go down that path.

4. I have started an online course to help me learn full-stack development. I’ve always thought of society’s obsession with ML/AI as a type of “shiny object syndrome”, with the majority of its fans being non-technical influencers and their followers.

   Although it has its use and its progress should be monitored closely, I feel traditional roles such as web development are still just as important, and shouldn’t be ignored.

   Not to mention what one learns in University is so out-of-touch with someone’s roles in a proper work environment, I decided to turn to online courses while I still have time before my first internship.

Plans for next week:

1. Speaking of shiny object syndrome, I seem to be suffering from such a case as well. My decision to learn full-stack development was followed by quite a bit of hesitation, as I was unsure as to what project I wanted to spend the next 4 months on. Since this is the one idea that seems the most possible to act on, I plan to stick to the webdev course I mentioned and hope to make some progress in it.
2. I want to try setting up the software needed for the lab work in my uni courses. I’ve been having some trouble figuring out the process but hopefully, a TA should help me out.

Welcome to my first blog. For long-time visitors and friends, this certainly isn’t my first post.

I have written a few long-form essays in the past, but have noticed it takes me a long time to collect interesting ideas and experiences to document them in an essay format.

I had also gone through a minor cosmetic surgery a while ago. I won’t be giving many details about this online for the sake of my privacy, however, the recovery phase requires me to be on a liquid diet until the end of September. This further contributed to my sloth lifestyle, causing me to be unproductive for many consecutive days.

To fix such issues, I have decided to write weekly journals/blogs where I document my general progression in my career and life. This would not only allow me to contribute to my website more frequently but would also help me be more accountable for my lifestyle choices and give readers of my blog a better idea of who I am as a person.

With that being said, let us begin discussing our first weekly report:

• I have modified the look of this site and have better organized the different types of content throughout my site to improve the UI.
• I have been able to finish working on TweetGen, QuoteGen, and PyVault. Three different personal projects which I have been working on simultaneously for the past one or two weeks, and have uploaded them all on GitHub.
• I have passed all courses I had taken in the summer, which helped me fix my CGPA after it had taken a dangerous hit due to my negligence during the winter semester.
• I have been able to properly workout today for the first time since my surgery, despite still being on a liquid diet.

Plans for next week:

• Continue focusing on my post-surgical recovery and be more consistent with my workouts.
• Try recovering my campus email address which was locked for some reason, and finally enable 2FA on it, which I have been neglecting to do so for a long time.