Reflecting on First Semester

I’m back at home for the christmas holidays. Now I can reflect on the first term and what a fantastic time I had! As you might expect, it was a time of trying and testing many things.

The most enjoyable part of the first term was creating a simulation of an Enigma Machine. Plugging all the parts together correctly so that I could decode the first message was such a rewarding moment. The trick to getting it right was apparently to do enormous amounts of testing. I decided to give test-driven development a go, where you actually write the tests first. The job then is simply to answer the question “Why aren’t the tests working?”. The answer to this is almost definitely “because you haven’t written the program yet.”

Of course, with enough practice, there are only two types of bug that an expert java programmer can’t avoid: out by one errors.

One of the more difficult modules in the first semester was Discrete Maths. I found it really interesting but sometimes completely baffling. I’ve learned the most in ‘Computer Systems and Applications’. It’s a module designed to bring you up to speed if (like me) you didn’t do computing A-level. The module runs the gamut from low level hardware right through to high level programming languages. For example, I never understood why so many Pascal programmers move to the Netherlands … it’s because they prefer to work below C-level. Okay, that one was terrible.

The other thing I’ve been testing this term is the University’s rich choice of societies. I helped out filming the University’s own version of “the Apprentice”. It was enormously fun and it’s going to be a quality program once it’s edited together. We even had a taxi to take the losing contestant home after the boardroom! So much happened in the first term I only wonder how the second term can possibly live up to it… stay tuned.