Just a quick update on my life and the status of this blog. I’ve started classes for my second year at RPI, and my summer internship at 3M went so well that they’ve hired me part-time for this fall!

Classes

This semester I’m taking Intro to Algorithms, which although more theoretical than I would like it to be will surely help with my coding. I am also taking Principles of Software, which is more software-engineering focused, and reinforces all those fun things like version control, unit testing, and clean/reusable/scalable code that I learned this summer. On the hardware side, I’m taking Electric Circuits, which I’ve heard is one of the more work-intesnive classes at RPI, but nevertheless should be fun. My last course is Computer Architecture, Networks, and Operating Systems (CANOS), which should also be interesting. I’m hoping to learn and use some assembly to help me with some of the lower-level programming.

My Internship

This summer at 3M, I helped clean up a legacy application. It was the largest codebase I’ve worked with so far, written over the course of many years, and began during the startup phase of the 3M division, which meant some of the architecture was sacrificed for increased development speed. This gave me the opportunity to not only understand the codebase, but refactor on a class and design level, rather than just with individual functions. Ultimately, I removed a manual dependency, switched much of the data retrieval over to use a REST Api, and added several new features to the application. This fall, I am now tasked with rewriting the entire tool from the ground up, with a modern architecture and a decoupled front-end and back-end. I’ve been researching backend technologies, and there is a chance we may go serverless, using AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), which I am super excited about! Once the backend is implemented, I will begin working on the frontend, most likely in Angular, which I also look forward to learning and using.

Other projects

I managed to finish my smart-home automated blinds over the summer, and should be doing a writeup on those soon. I’m currently in the second iteration of the skateboard lighting, having learned far more about both software and hardware since I began the project. As coding projects, I have several ideas to add to my twitter bot, and I’m working through a web development to learn the MEAN stack everyone’s so excited about. Look for writeups and more projects coming soon!