Buffer Overflow: Too Many Ideas

Three years ago I was nowhere near the programmer I am today. Yet I feel less productive. In fact, I feel overwhelmed by all the ideas I have written down in notebooks and text files. I’m talking about a couple of dozen ideas. Many of them are unrelated to one another making them seem less appealing to tackle. While others don’t seem like good ideas anymore. I can live with throwing out bad ideas, as we learn and mature we see things through wiser lenses. For me the unrest is with the ideas that seem to not fit together.

Part of me wanted to burn, and delete all the ideas from the last few years and start fresh. They felt like a burden, a glimpse into a less experienced and naïve mind. Instead I took a more rational approach by reviewing the list and keeping two projects to work on during the remainder of 2016. One project was a project I planned in June of 2014 and it’s building a calculator in HTML/CSS/JS. I recently started working on the project with good results. The second project I kept is from December 2015. The project is making a beginners C++ lesson on YouTube. This will give me a chance to review core C++ topics and finally use the Bridge Town Technologies YouTube visual identity I developed in the beginning of the year. I think these projects are reasonable in scope and will help to solidify skills I frequently use. In my last post I mentioned that I would set time aside for personal projects without any detail. I finally spent some time to figure out how and when to take on personal projects. School breaks, without stress. Simple and straight forward. Click here to check out the basic calculator repository on GitHub.

Reflecting on my Lower Division Undergraduate Computer Science Studies

In the spring of 2014 I decided to leave my life as a touring musician and food service worker behind to embark on a journey towards greener pastures and decided to enroll in college to get a Computer Science (CS) degree. Studying CS was something I wanted to do while in high school. However, life took me in different directions. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs I spent my 20’s touring the world with bands and making ends meet by standing in various kitchens which often resembled Mordor.

Realizing You Actually Stayed Productive

I started this blog nine months ago with the intent of it being a place where I could publish thoughts about really nerdy shit, such as math, programming, and computer science related topics.

Is Microsoft Edge Really The Big Contender Among Browsers?

One of the release highlights of Windows 10 was Microsoft’s new web browser ‘Edge’. Earlier in 2015 Microsoft began announcing the new browser under the code name ‘Project Spartan’, an event which many tech journalists wrote about with enthusiasm. The narrative was, Microsoft would be back in the browser game, and bury Internet Explorer once and for all. During this years Microsoft Build Developer Conference some interesting information was revealed regarding the new bro

Windows 10 – First Impressions From A Developer

Windows 10 – First Impressions From A Developer.

Windows 10 – First Impressions From A Developer

Upgrade And First Impressions

Like many other people I woke up this morning with a Windows 10 upgrade pending on my  laptop. The upgrade process took roughly 3 hours, and everything worked flawlessly. Microsoft did a good job at rolling out the upgrade. At this point my desktop does is waiting to get its upgrade.

“Do I Have To Be ‘Good’ At Math To Be A ‘Good’ Programmer?”

When I was younger I asked myself the same question many young or inexperienced programmers ask in the form of forum posts and stack exchange questions today: “Do I have to be good at mathematics to be a ‘good’ programmer?” Recently while tipsy and bored I

My First Freelance Web Development Job

After being laid off from my part time food service job for the summer I decided that going back to the kitchen was not an option considering I’m a Computer Science student. My plan was to ask some acquaintances who own their own small businesses if they wanted to hire me to re-design or make entirely new web sites for them. I spent some time reading various blogs and articles about freelance web development before starting my mission. To my surprise I got work on my first inquiry.

Don’t Abuse Adobe Muse

I purchased my one year Adobe CC student subscription in the fall of 2014. As I was scrolling through vast list of programs I had leased, I noticed a new member of the Adobe family. After about 4 minutes of research I learned which group of users it targeted. Adobe Muse is a WYSIWYG web design tool intended for graphic designers to create websites without having to know how to write HTML/CSS, or even basic JavaScript. After discovering what Muse offered to the world of web design, I couldn’t help but think back to the days of the Yahoo GeoCities page builder.

Thoughts on Math – Exploration Discovery and Applications

Looking back at the progression of my education in mathematics as far back as grade school in Germany there are some common learning patterns which I have been able to identify. Noticing common learning patterns in mathematics was something I only began to recognize in my current college pre-calculus/trigonometry sequence course.