Steady Progress

Hello, it has been a while since I last posted. But basically I have been busy catching up with classes and midterms. Thankfully I finished the last of my midterms a week ago and I’ve had some time to work on the group project. So to recap a bit, last time I mentioned I was anxious about the idea of contributing to a real-world project and how, given my limited knowledge of programming languages, it poses an obstacle to my working in this project. But in the last few weeks I’ve done a lot of studying, reading and research on a bunch of diferent topics surrounding the Julia programming langauage and I finally feel like I got some grasp of it. The whole code base and structure of the project is finally starting to feel familiar and I’m finding it much easier to navigate through the files and understand each function definitions. As a group, we have isolated two issues, the first being a documentation issue and the second one a printing/ouput issue. Now in terms of complexity they’re both good first issues, good for first timers, so that’s why we’re attempting it but, there’s still a lot to understand about the code and how it’s implemented. So I have been working on the documentation issue and I’ve managed to understand a lot of the code base and I’m starting to write out the documentation for a few of the functions. As I said before, that I dont really feel comfortable enough to produce code for such a big project so the documentation issue is ideal for myself as I will gain some invaluable experience working on a project and it’ll also help me understand the langauage a lot better. As for the second issue, I’m not certain as to how much I’m going to be contributing but I will do my part for the group. However I am going to produce the documentation for the code that we write and also give my suggestions based on what I know. But overall I am happy to report that there has been progress with the project and I’m writing out a draft for the documentation issue. We might be close to submitting our first pull request in the next few weeks. One of the requirements with the documentation issue is that we also have to provide examples on how to use each function so I’m also writing out a testing documentation for the code. So I have been really immersing myself in the language thus far and it has been going great. I shall keep updating on the status of the project.

As for class assignments and activities, for the past week and a half, we’ve been going over UNIX commands and and how to do clever things with them. It has been really helpful as I have learnt a great deal of new UNIX commands which i’ll be using no doubt. We’ve also had an assessment on those commands which I didn’t do very well lol. But yea that basically a rough sketch of how’s the semester been so far. We’re meeting up as a group every week and working on the project and we’re making steady progress. That’s all for this week. I dont know how my standing is in the class but I’m not sure if I’m doing too well. So i really need the project to help me out in terms of grading. That is all, thanks for checking in!