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.

Websites

     I've started to work on developing the Chroni section of cirdles.org with Jekyll hosted by Github and it's been rather fun. I haven't done website development since my first year of high school (basic development at that) and Jekyll provides an easy way to do it. I am considering using Jekyll for my blog and will post if I do switch over to a new blog and its address, but for now it will remain the same.
     The Android version of Chroni is coming closer to a more complete version and I am hoping that by February I can start developing the iOS version. My next project after I finish adding the help section on the website is to start adding test cases. When I start with the iOS version, I will begin with adding testing so I can start with test driven development.

Major Academic Year Support (MAYS)

     Currently, I am working on a grant to fund my research with CIRDLES. Never in my life have I thought that I would eventually have to write a grant. My most brainiac brother would write grant proposals and get them and I thought, man he's so smart, look at his life. It never occurred to me that I might one day also apply for one. Even if it's not accepted, I think it's a big step in my life and could lead me in the right direction. I'm very excited to see how things will progress until my graduation. 

     Sometimes I think it was just luck. I came to college, a semester in started with a research team, and then another semester later took over the project I was working on. I constantly think of these things as luck, but in actuality, it was just me trying to do something for myself. I sought out research because I had mentors that assured me it was possible. These mentors have led me to want to mentor people myself. I want to do what they did for me. In the spring I'll be a peer facilitator for the Android App and Development FYE and I hope I can inspire them. I hope that I'll do for them what my peer facilitator did for me. 

Late Update

     It's been a while since I've written a blog post, and since then, I've been working an additional job.

     I have officially taken over the production of CHRONI and have been trying to get the bugs all sorted. There was a bug that crashed the whole app and many of the features that were implemented before disappeared. I started a base from version 0.6.0 and worked from there trying to implement everything again. I finally have a working product and a pre-release was released on CHRONI's github page. It is now at version 0.8.1 and my next project is the fix the formatting of the aliquot table.
     I have been working on that table for I don't even know how long and I still can't figure it out. I'm sure it's some simple solution that I'm just not grasping, but I need to use ET Redux to fix it and I'm having problems with that. It's quite a nightmare. I was able to get Redux to work once, but I can't anymore and now I'm just comparing the xml file to my table in CHRONI, which doesn't work that well because it's the formatting from the xml I need to fix, not incorrect numbers. I'm mostly confused on the % sigma columns. I have found in the code where to fix everything, but I don't have the knowledge to fix it.
     I think I'm getting better with app development, but I'm still so lost. I haven't realized until quite recently. I need a big project to work from the ground up using a template like making CHRONI for iOS. There are so many things I'm just looking at and not really grasping the concept of. Hopefully when the rest of these bugs are fixed for the android app, I can learn much more with iOS.

iOS - Xcode

     So, I am currently learning Xcode so I can start programming CHRONI for iOS. Right now, I'm having a lot of troubles, but I'm sure I'll be able to get a grasp of it soon. There is a course online that I want to take and when I found it, it said it was 75% off and was at $50 and that it expired at the end of the day I discovered it. I figured they were trying to scare people into it being much more if they didn't act fast and so I called their bluff, but I was wrong. The next day it was back at $200. The company, Udemy, keeps giving me a 50% off coupon, but I think I'll just try to wait it out and see if it will go back down to 75% off. I think it's a bit ridiculous to buy something like that even at $50, but I was looking at reviews of it and it goes through making a lot of mock apps that we use frequently like  Instagram, a list app, and others.
     Like I said, I am having difficulty getting use to Xcode, but here is a little preview of what I've done today with CHRONI for iOS.

Unity (Game Engine)

     I have recently been following an indie game developer. The game he has been creating has been under development for exactly one year this month and the developer writes a blog and makes youtube videos about his development. The concept of the game is quite interesting and watching the development of the game really excites me. After developing for a year, anytime I see a game, an app, or a program in general, the possible code just runs through my head. You will always see bugs in a program and I constantly envision the changes that would be needed to make the bug no longer occur. That being said, I want to play around with Unity to see if I can contribute to the game if the developer needs it. Dabbling in many different IDEs is great to expand my knowledge and also, I would need to learn C, C++, or C# to help develop. Having another language under my belt will be exceptional and will help me in the future.

      What I am saying, is that I have become so interested in software development that I like seeing how something progresses and as I watch more of the developer create this game, the more I want to help with the project. Maybe I will start playing with Unity, but who knows. I also said I wanted to start developing for iOS this summer (this involves learning Swift/Objective-C) as well as make a Carta app for the college for both Android and iOS. I want to do so many things that I don't think I will have the time to do all of them, but having the desire to work with all of them shows how much passion I have for my field. 

     I feel like everything in my life is falling into place and I have finally started feeling that I am of importance to people. I have so much planned for me and I'm really excited to see those things work out for the future.