School is Cool
12-28-22

"Woah, the website looks better!"

Yes, yes it does. Upon writing this, I realized I didn't take any screenshots of the previous design besides thisone. Instead of using all self-made CSS, I am now using Bootstrap 5! I am technically still using the previous stylesheet, most notably for the blog archive page. That dropdown button code is too precious for me to just throw away. The main reason I came back and added BS5 is that the website looked TERRIBLE on mobile. On the main page, my profile image was comically stretched, and you had to zoom in to read the text on the other pages. I knew I had to come back at some point and correct this. Now, the pages are wrapped in BS5 containers, use columns/rows, and uses div classes that properly adjust to the screen size, even on mobile. I also changed the color palette again, and I am now using a forced dark theme for the background (color #222222 to be exact). In addition, this website is now hosted on Adaptable because Heroku no longer offers free web hosting.

And now for the reason why school is cool...

Because I learn things! I was enrolled in five classes this past semester: Computer Graphics, Computer Game Design, Algorithms, Machine Learning, and Capstone. Here's a little overview of each class:

Capstone with Seasalt.AI

This isn't really a typical class. It's an opportunity to work on a large-scale software development project for a sponsor. My group's sponsor is Seasalt.AI, and our primary objectives are to create an Indonesian speech-to-text machine learning model, a Japanese STT model, and to train Seasalt's existing English STT model with more accented data. As of this post, we optimized the currently existing data collection pipeline, trained a few hundred hours of accented English, and created a baseline Indonesian model.

Computer Graphics

A very cool class that taught how 3D graphics are done. Our assignments were done in WebGL. This class was my favorite this semester, and I want to work on another WebGL project that I can showcase on this website. I do have my final project live on GitHub.io for anyone to view. It may be found here.Here is a project post that talks more about thescene.Side note: if the skybox doesn't load, you'll need to reload the webpage.

Computer Game Design

An introductory class to 2D arcade games from the 80s. It covered topics like, networking, collision, Git, and state-based mechanics. We made two games using the Slick2D game engine with Java 1.8. I will have another project post to talk about them in depth here.Overall, I really liked the class for my first game called Pushover. But the second game project felt like a repeat of the first one in some ways, and I wish we were given the opportunity to work in a contemporary (and perhaps even 3D) game engine like Unity for the second project.

Machine Learning

A neat class taught by the same professor that taught graphics. I learned supervised models like Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, and Random Forests, and unsupervised models like KMeans Clustering and Agglomerative Clustering. My final project was a Kaggle competition of using Natural Language Processing to predict if a Twitter tweet reports a natural disaster. Our highest score was 80.4%, which is fairly high.

Algorithms

This class was heavy on theory, but it did have a few coding assignments to demonstrate time complexities. We learned about big O notation, fast sorting algorithms, graph search, dynamic programming, and a few tree data structures.

Overall, I had fun

This semester was heavy, heavy, heavy in projects, but I managed to stay afloat in my classes. On the side, my internship with Lumen Learning has been going great. I'm not sure how much technical material I'm allowed to discuss, but I've been programming thousands of questions for Lumen's Online Homework Manager (OHM). My hard work there has earned me an extension! I feel blessed that I've been given the opportunity to continue working in a professional environment.

Well, thanks for reading this blog post! Stay tuned for a new graphics project. I'm hoping I can roll something out before my next semester starts in January.

Griffen