The End of the Semester Hit Me Quite Hard

Well, back after a long time away from the blog. Why? Holidays and exams.

The end of the semester hit me quite hard, I went on holidays planning on revising for the exams and doing coursework, and truth is I tried, but it didn’t happen. Therefore, by the time I got back everything was on top of me. Luckily it worked out quite well, I ate, drank and breathed books and Java and finally got through it. The lesson? This whole uni deal takes some getting used to and be aware that even if you really want to, planning on revising over your Christmas holidays when the whole family is around is actually quite utopic.

Now, this second half of the year is packed with some interesting stuff. The way I see it, during the first half of the year you are provided with the building blocks that you will need in the future, such as mathematical skills, Java basics, some digital electronics; whilst the second half focuses a bit more on applying those skills, or building blocks to be better (or the elite, as professors like to say) at programming.
Second week in we have already been hit with some C pointers, b-method and time complexity of algorithms; talking about the latter we measured some poorly coded algorithm’s running time for some high constant in several thousand ages of the universe, and that’s the reason we must be quite efficient when coding one.

So far, I must say I am happy.

We also have our fun times over here, the BIG Windows vs Linux fights that take place during the ‘System Administration Tools and Techniques’ lectures are just hilarious, worth waking up early for.

As I believe I wrote before, this is a great place to make friends and everybody is very helpful when you need them. I tend to work on my laptop (at home) most of the time, although every time for some reason I decide to go into the lab it ends up being more than worth it. That is why even if I feel lazy about it sometimes (it easier to work at home with food and beer at hand at all times) I push myself into using Zepler labs.
A few months ago I joined ECS’s football team. It is going very well, every once in a while, or quite often actually, I get kicked or accidentally punched but the exercise and fun are just fantastic. And it is a brilliant group of people.

See you around.