Updates

In my last update, I said that I was caught in a storm, not knowing what to do. In October, I was really trying to find my way out of the storm and currently, I don’t know if I actually made it out of the storm or I’m just in the eye.

I feel like a sail boat caught in a tide, trying its best not to get sucked into a maelstrom. But, the maelstrom doesn’t look that bad so I am quite confused. I’ve been quite busy applying for the summer internships, doing course assignemnts, labs, the usual college stuff. For the internships, I’ve been getting some coding tests and video interviews, but I wasn’t able to hear good news.. Last week, I quickly formed up a Portfolio website since I thought it would be a great idea to showcase some of my projects. So, I guess I’ll see how it goes.

Fall semester has started and it’s been two weeks into it already. This semester, I’m taking Operating Systems and Networking for my CS major and a bunch of electives for my degree. This will be the last semester with non-CS electives and I’m not sure how it will go next semester with no electives and CS courses all the way. (Maybe it might be better?)

In June, I setup a local server with the Raspberry Pi. I needed a server that was free and easy to manage. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ that I had in hand was a perfect choice. I know the Raspberry Pi is not free but I didn’t have to pay a monthly fee for it.

May was a very busy month due to the Local Election. At work, we had to go around town and put up election posters and announcements, pack leaflet/flyers in mails to send to all the residents, transport various equipments, and more. On the voting day, I got up early in the morning and got to the place beforehand to make sure all the devices were in place and ready. The voting went on from 6 AM to 18 PM. For 30 minutes, we equipped ourselves with protective gear to prepare for the voting for the ones with COVID-19. People who were in self-quarantine were able to leave their house between 18:30 and 19:30 to vote. The voting ended at 19:30 and we started cleaning up the place that we rented out for the election. The whole process ended around 20:30 and it surely was a long day. On the next several days, we went around town to clean up everything that we put around town for the election and it was a truckful. It weighed around 500 kilos (about 1000 lbs) and I never knew an election would produce this much waste. Keeping in mind that this is just from one town and there are about 426 (or 467 depending on the perspective) towns in Seoul, the fact that so much is buried or burnt has blew my mind. I really hope elections could be done online but there will obviously be some issues mostly with security.

A couple of days ago, I finished working on Heroklock. The goal of the project was to get familiar with the Golang programming language and multithreaded programming using goroutine. Despite having the title of multithreaded programming, the Heroklock application only has two threads… It’s still multithreaded, right? One thread served the HTTP server and the other was set to run at an interval to keep the Heroku apps online. In the end, Golang made it very easy to implement multithreaded applications using the go keyword and the communication between threads were straight forward.

Updating my About page was an objective which I have been postponing for quite a while. The task wasn’t too hard, but it just wasn’t enticing enough for me to work on it. But one day, I just sat down and went f**k it let’s just do it and began to fancify my About page. These encounters of just do its seems inevitable in my life but always happen when it is least expected. I guess that’s just how it is.

A lot has happened since the last update. I recently started preparing to return to campus. However, there was a slight inconvenience. The deadline for returning students to apply for on-campus housing was way due so I will probably have to go off-campus for 2022 Fall and 2023 Spring 😢. Guess I will have to start looking for off-campus rooms and roommates.

Unfortunately, I skipped September because I was too busy with my military service. If September was hitting the lowest, October was skyrocketing through the roof 🚀. I cleaned my room, bought some new clothes, made some cool cash selling old books, and read some books that I found while cleaning. Related to CS, I was able to work on the side projects and learn something new!

It’s another monthly update since July. I think having these monthly status updates are working out quite well. It gives me a thorough retrospect of the month and I think it helps me keep track of my progress on projects.

Amidst all the struggle and nothing new worth sharing, I thought I would put a status update to toss some fuel on this blog. In short, I finally got the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine and I also started working on some projects.