A Semester in the Classroom​

I volunteer co-teaching an advanced computer science class at a Houston high school. This involves me being in the classroom for up to three days per week. In addition to lecturing, lesson planning, and grading, I’m simultaneously mentoring and being mentored by an experienced science teacher who has never taught programming before. One of my majors was computer science, and I have years of real-world software engineering experience supplementing my formal education. In turn, the teacher provides excellent guidance on education methodologies and best practices, as well as moral support.

My first week of teaching is in the books, and there’s already a ton to reflect on. Overall, I think that class so far has been a success, but I’ve already identified several opportunities for improvement.

The Use Case​

I own two domains for my personal site. I have a primary domain that I use for most occasions, but I also recently acquired another. Rather than having the second domain remain unused, my goal was simply to have both configured simultaneously without configuring multiple environments.

Recently, Google announced significant changes to the Maps platform to mixed reactions from the development community. While the myriad of products have now been combined and refactored for simplicity, the general concerns seem to stem around a steep increase in price, a Google billing account requirement, falling victim to overage charges from DDoS attacks, and a mere 30-day notice of these changes. All of these factors have many developers (especially of small to medium-sized projects) considering other platforms for map services.

While my development choices for the frontend change as rapidly as new JavaScript frameworks come and go, I’ve remained pretty consistent with using the .NET ecosystem for my server-side needs. I still use Node.js, Spring Boot, and Flask for several side projects, but I’ve grown to love the power of .NET and C# over the past several years while it has been the default technology at my job. My two biggest complaints were the monolithic scale of .NET Framework and the fact that it required Windows (or Mono which hasn’t always been backed by Xamarin/Microsoft). Both of these changed with the advent of .NET Core. This alternative is cross-platform, modular, and much more performant. While both .NET Framework and .NET Core are implementations of .NET Standard, .NET Core very much seems to be the preferred way of the future.

Overview​

It’s very well documented that I’m a huge college football fan. We’re presently in the College Football Playoff era of Division I football, which involves a selection committee choosing four playoff teams to compete to be the national champion. The previous era, known as the Bowl Championship Series era, involved a combined poll of human experts and computer algorithms choosing the two best teams to play in the national championship game. One such algorithm is known as the Colley Matrix. Though not a factor in the post-season selection process anymore, it’s still referred to at times, particularly when debating the selection committee’s decisions. Based on the whitepaper written by Colley himself and [an existing JavaScript implementation](an existing JavaScript implementation), I developed this NuGet package for simulating head-to-head matchups and applying the Colley algorithm. This algorithm can be applied to any sport or competitions without tie games.

Overview​

This NuGet package provides a C# interface to easily query and fetch kanji data from the Kanji Alive public API. This package is designed to simplify development of Japanese learning desktop and web applications on the C#/.NET platform.

The Plan​

Before the start of the 2016 college football season, two good friends and I decided to make an epic pilgrimage for the opening weekend. While most games are played on Saturdays, it just so happened that our alma maters played on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Labor Day weekend. The three of us all lived in Oklahoma at the time, so we began planning the logistics to see if it would even be physically possible to be at each stadium by kickoff. The matches were Kansas State at Stanford in Palo Alto, California (for Chris), UCLA at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas (for Callen), and Notre Dame at Texas in Austin, Texas (for me). Despite requiring about 4,500 miles of total travel, we determined that it would be possible to see all the games barring any sort of delays. We took a gamble, and this is how it all played out.

It’s safe to say that I’m biased because of my alma mater, but I personally think that burnt orange is one of the most versatile colors. It’s somewhat polarizing due to being the primary color of the University of Texas, but I use it as one of the core colors here on my personal website to show my Longhorn pride. Inspired by this color palette, I’ve created a theme for Atom, my favorite text editor, and released version 1.0.0 just in time for the start of college football season.

April 30th, 2016 - 電車の風 - Tokyo​