C4P Community Development Workshop

     Back in April, I was asked to attend a development workshop in Colorado. I had no idea what it was about, but my professor was going and he really wanted me to get this experience so I said yes. On Saturday the 18th, the day before I was to leave for Boulder, I get a call from Dr. Bowring telling me he could not go; however he still really wanted me to attend this workshop. I flew by myself from Myrtle Beach to Charlotte to Denver and then found my shuttle that would take me to Boulder and there I got checked in to the apartment style inn.
     At first I was pretty anxious about the whole thing because we were to split up into teams and create our own project. I had no idea what I was doing, but finally figured it out by 1pm. A small group of app developers sat next to me (who created Fly Overcounty check it out) so we formed a team together. We started building our project with Ionic, a cross platform app development framework which makes things much easier than separately making an Android Studio project and Xcode project.
     Because we've been having so much trouble developing CHRONI with Xcode lately, we've decided to switch over to Ionic. We will have the same issues with getting up to speed on how things work, but it has much better documentation. The other added bonus is that it has a MVC style work environment and is very similar to some of the work we did last semester in Server Side. Needless to say, this change will be easier to manage and won't make our heads explode.

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Here is the article the department posted about C4P: Where in the World is CS Faculty

Official App Release

     I'd like to announce that version one of CHRONI has officially been released on Github. I can't believe how far the app has come since I started developing it and I'm so excited to start developing it for iOS. It is not yet on the google play store, but hopefully will be soon in the next couple of days. Here is what the home screen of CHRONI now looks like:

As Sophomore Year Closes...

     As of today, at 9:36, I am official done with my second year of college. Looking back over the semester, I have learned an immense amount of information. My programming style and thoughts on attacking problems has improved significantly. This semester I joined our computer science department's ACM club and started attending their programming jam sessions where my team, camel_case, won first place for a majority of the sessions. While this has helped me get better at my planned attack on problems, I owe a majority of my programming improvements to my Data Structures and Algorithms class led by Bill Manaris. These improvements include error handling, my stylistic choices for programs, and abstract data types. For one homework, I had to make a DNA molecule where I implemented a conjoined linked-list. Each index of the left helix had to point to the right helix and vice versa to form the bond between the nucleotides. While the exams for this class were very hard, they improved my knowledge even further. I was able to expand my knowledge while taking an exam which is not very common. Exams are designed to test what you know, but these exams challenged us to go even further. One question on my final exam was to reverse the items of a queue by using a stack. I definitely didn't understand what the question was asking on the test (it was worded very strange), but now it makes so much sense. Stacks have a method pop() that gets rid of top element and returns it's value. I could have simply populated the stack by dequeuing the queue (FIFO) and then setting the stacks values (LIFO). I could then repopulate the queue by setting each item to what is returned by pop() (the last one in is the first one out making it in reverse order once added back into the queue). I couldn't imagine being able to write ADTs for binary search trees, linked-lists, trees, stacks, queues before this class. There's much more information we didn't even get to cover in just a semester such as hash-tables, heaps, and others I don't even know exist yet. This is only the end of my second year at the College of Charleston and there's so much more I'll learn because of our great department.