“And now the end is here
And so I face that final curtain…” – Frank Sinatra (1969)
This past semester has been quite the adventure. Starting off, I barely knew what I was doing, and I had no idea what a “small” class looked like at Tech yet. Everything I knew was large 200+ person lectures with contact with only the TAs (barely), and effectively none with the professor. This English class was my first taste of a nice, small college class where there’s less than 30 people in a room, and a professor that has time during class to approach and ask for feedback. Coming from a small private high school, this was seemingly a little bit of familiarity, of course, until l learned how the class operated. The whole “this class has very few essays”, “your goal is to get x number of points”, and having no tests or final exam was quite new and different. To me, English without, well, writing English seemed crazy to me, at least until I got started in the class.
Starting at the beginning, I had to select a project. Over the past few years, I have been running this project called ScratchDB, an analytics project collecting a very large sum of data from Scratch, a programming website from MIT (this might be repeated a few times through various documents). This project has multiple systems which take in data, chose what data gets downloaded, sift through the data, and lastly serve the data to my “customers”. My system simply provided an interface for other developers to use my system. This is defined as a REST API, or simply, a system that other programs call to for information.
For example, here is what someone made with a decent sum of my data:
And now, here is what I give to this system:
As you can see, my system isn’t something many people actually look at, but what it provides can be quite powerful for others. So back to the history. This program has been the culmination of work since around 2019, where the project initially started out as a way to keep track of deleted forum posts to keep an archive. Pretty soon after this, I got into collecting profiles and follower lists to try to somewhat “back up” the website, but this quickly descended into me writing what is seen today.
Fast forward to today, and this system has been running somewhat stably without many changes for the past year or two. I’ve had requests to add to it or make it faster, but I’ve never really had much of a reason to do so. Well, this English class provided an opportunity. The whole idea of being able to select almost any area of research, so long as it had some multimodality and an idea of world building, seemed like the perfect opportunity to revise my old project (that has since aided in getting me an internship for the summer!). So, thus began me creating the fourth revision of my project, which would have a lot of learning to do, for my class project. (the project idea is discussed more in-full under the process documents).
As class continued and we began to learn of using different aspects of media in our projects, such as adding video, audio, and photos, it initially seemed like it wasn’t really talking to me since my project was, well, programming. But, as the semester continued I began to see where everything started to come together.
The first experience was with the introductory video, which combined my love for editing, video, and computer science (explained later). This showed that programming and computer knowledge isn’t necessarily limited to simply writing code: it could be used to edit video and plan a script. This really began to open up the project for the rest of the semester.
The next biggest thing I learned with the class, besides the whole multimodality of computer science (cool note: also changed my threads to include media, continuing multimodality for my career in the future), is the process of learning something new. This class provided a framework for how to research, from keeping notes, and always making sure you have the URLs of pieces you used in your learning process.
When programming in the past, I had plenty of tabs open to at least 15 different Stack Overflow sources (for those that don’t know, Stack Overflow is a site where programmers ask questions and others reply with code snippets and explanations) and multiple random blog posts of people trying to do the same thing I was. This class changed that dynamic: it made me think about the credibility and importance of a source.
There are thousands of random sources for small snippets of code, but at the end of the day, that’s just one person writing something that worked for them. By looking more deeply into the source, such as how recent it was written, what their purpose in writing it was, and how close they are to the “original” developers of the programming language, I was able to get a much more accurate idea of the proper ways to do things. I’ll discuss this more in my conclusion discussing the process of learning, but effectively, by having to note my sources, I was much better able to grasp what I needed to find out for my project.
So I guess now that brings me to my final deliverable. Well, unfortunately, I don’t have very much at all to present as a final project. Unfortunately, other classes and other projects got in the way due to the aspect of needing to sit down and write code for long periods of time (See Conclusion -> Falling Short). This doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything or have nothing to present however. At the end of the class, I was left with a new way of researching how to make my programs and organize my work. I never really took much time to “plan” my projects, since I really just quickly found what works and went with it, not thinking of how it could affect the project later down the line, but with the increased requirements of looking into the sources I use, I started to write designs and plan how every little intricacy of my project will work. So I may not have a final deliverable, but I at least have a plan of how I could make this project in the future, and I also have what I learned in, well, learning how to learn.