“too many interests, too many exciting opportunities for learning, research, and thought. What a marvelous predicament! Not only is the end not in sight, the pace is not slackening. We have many future joys.”
This blog post is a reminder to myself of the things I have acomplished in 2021. The purpose is to be able to look at it one day as my history and remind myself of the things I have done, felt, and seen.
Career
- Graduated from the University of Victoria with a BSc in Computer Science with a minor in Business (August)
- Started working at Bitquill Technologies working on database connectivity (September)
Projects
NimbleFlight
NimbleFlight is a flight controller based on the stm32f3 discovery board. This project includes both the software and hardware to run the flight controller. It is currently a work in progress but this year I was able to make a lot of headway on the software side of things. 2022 will hopefully get me to a point I can work on the hardware and polish the software. I am currently working on a rewrite of the software to incorperate a RTOS with memory protection and better debuggability than what I currently wrote.
Compiler (CSC 435)
As part of my course work for UVic’s CSC 435 course with Jason Dorless we were tasked with writing a compiler with Antlr. The project was extremely fun and informative. I ended the course with a great grade and working compiler for the unamed language. Further I was able to extend my learning outside of the classroom, I spent some time learning Racket and the #lang features provided. From there I extended my programming language journey to Rust where I wrote a DSL (proc-macro) to generate a Lexer and am currently working to extend the DSL to a parser.
AlpineToast
This is a tiny js library I wrote to create toasts, those pop ups you see on websites when take a action which may not have a visual effect but want comfirmation. The library was fun to write and interesting to make work across multiple frameworks. Sadly the library turned into a scope creep disaster as I kept thinking of different ways others may want to use it and adding random features. Overall it was a great learning experience (yes even the scope creep).
RustySnake
This year due to the pandemic I decieded not to participate in BattleSnake. Some people use the project as a template however so I figured I would spend the effort to update the dependencies and modify it for the latest version of the game.
Village
It seems like every year I rewrite my private social media application (me and my close friends) and this year was no exception. With the growing popularity of Phoenix Liveview I decieded to make use of its features. In all honesty I was a little disapointed in composability of LiveView Components but there is no doubt it is productive. Elixir and Phoenix are something I would definitely use again when the usecase comes up. Overall this project is just to scratch my own itch for writing web apps and trying the new and cool latest tech.
Hobbies
- Beach Volleyball (Vancouver)
- Dungeons and Dragons (Dragons of Icespire Peak)
- Camping (Squamish)
- Cooking
- Fishing (Squamish, Capilano, Ontario, Quebec, Vedder)
- Rock Climbing
- Brewing (beer)
- Gym (2-5 times a week)
Books Read
- Dune
- Review: fantastic
- Computer Organization and Design: RISC-V edition
- Reason: I wanted to understand my computers better
- A People’s History of Computing in the United States
- Reason: I wanted to understand how we got to where we are with technology
- The Sould of a New Machine
- Reason: Recommended by Byran Cantrill many times on Twitter
- Review: Probably the best book I read this year
- Less
- Reason: mistook this book for another minimalizim book
- Review: To me, this book was like listening to a friend tell you about their day, trip, or just generally their life. It was enjoyable and generally stress-free. It was great to have a break in between technical books.
- The Mythical Man Month
- Reason: Seems like it is mandatory software developer book
- Favorite Quote: “too many interests, too many exciting opportunities for learning, research, and thought. What a marvelous predicament! Not only is the end not in sight, the pace is not slackening. We have many future joys.”
- The Very Real, Totally Bizarre Bucatini Shortage of 2020(Not a book but a really well written article, which also put me on to my favorite pasta)