vuurrobins devblog

Well, the first week of my second year at college is over (I’m doing an ICT education). The first year was mostly general and diverse stuff, so students could see which way they want to go. So the second year is more about what you want and more in depth, what I like. We’ve used java in the first year and we’re using java now, so we did need to refresh our knowledge of the first year. Before we started with the 2 courses, we needed to do 2 assignments.

The first was to fill in some parts of a program to refresh some stuff like inheritance, polymorphism, creating and overriding methods and ArrayLists. Filling the stuff in and getting the program to work was easy and the few bugs that were in it were quickly solved. However, there were some warnings in the code (mostly variables that were already added into the program but were never used), so I added some stuff to also get rid of the warnings, while mumbling to myself that the creators of the original program shouldn’t be adding stuff if its not necessary (or add it if it is necessary). The least they could do is making it part of the assignment, like: add setters and getters for variable xxx. Anyway, this assignment was complete.

The next assignment was to get a yellow belt at the website www.javablackbelt.com. You can get the yellow belt by taking 2 simple exams about the basic stuff of java and OOP. This was actually pretty fun, and pretty easy. So after passing both exams, I had the bragging right of telling people that I have a yellow belt in java . For the orange belt, you need to take another exam (among other things, I think). So I thought, the first 2 exams were easy, let’s try the next exam. However, that didn’t go as well as I liked. Turns out that the yellow belt was meant for all basic programmers, but that for the orange belt you needed to have knowledge of stuff like asserts, threats and exceptions and stuff. Seeing as I’ve hardly worked with that, and that I program more in c++ than java, I failed the exam, twice. O well, at least I have a yellow belt. And if they ever start a www.cplusplusblackbelt.com website, then I’m pretty sure I can do better.

Then school started. My god what early. I’m the kind of guy that works best in the evening and at night, and likes to sleep in the morning. But for school I have to get out of bed at 6:20 in the morning (I always mix up AM and PM). Luckily, we mostly get theory so I don’t have to do a lot of thinking in the morning. And on most days, school stops at 12:00, so I have the entire afternoon free.

The first course I have is about designing OO applications. Basically, we learn to use UML to see what need to be done in an application. Creating use cases, class and object diagrams, learning what agile and test driven development is, that kind of stuff. It’s pretty fun and useful.

The second course I have is about creating distributed applications, which are applications that use threats and networks to divide the work on multiple processor cores and computers. We haven’t done much about it, but we have spend most of the time installing some interesting programs, reading the course manual and learning some theory. We’ll probably start programming next week (or we should have started it this week and I just missed it, I don’t know).

I also have a few hours every 2 weeks where we learn some social skills, like communicating and working in teams. I haven’t had this so I can’t tell much about it.

I think that this year will be more fun that last year, mostly its more about what I want instead of the general stuff (web design and databases isn’t really my thing).

As for non school stuff, I’ve finished playing kingdom hearts 1 and 2 (which sucked up a large part of my time), and I’ve been spending a lot of time (maybe to much time) on improving the affine matrix functions of DSOL. Hopefully I can continue on DSOL soon.