Writing

2023 Reflection & 2024 Goals

A lot changed very quickly after I started my Bachelor's in Computer Science.

Jobs are meant to go away

Think about it. Biomedical researchers don't plan to research cure to cancer for the rest of humanity. City planners don't plan to build infinite number of cities, and washing machine manufacturers don't plan to make infinite iterations of their product. At some point, we'll have cured every known illness, come up with the best city design that adapts perfectly to every possible situation, and a washing machine that can also dry your clothes. These 'progressive' jobs are designed to eliminate themselves.

Dev tools you should be using

I think all software developers can agree on spending hours on eliminating the smallest inconveniences for the sake of efficiency (whether it actually improves efficiency is another matter). This is my collection of tools that I use for just that - with some of them being ones I can't live without.

How Did I Get Here?

I lived most of my life without a thought of pursuing computer science. In fact, most of my childhood went by without thinking much at all. I just entertained myself with whatever I enjoyed whether I was good at them or not. When I grew old enough to start considering my future career, I was certain I wanted to become a mechatronics engineer and build cool robots. That abruptly changed at the age of 17 as I realized there was so much I could contribute to humanity through cellular agriculture research. And just as I was confident my goals wouldn't change, I decided to drop everything and pursue computer science.

Rust made me rethink everything

Alternate title: JS dev shocked to learn Rust is indeed a low-level language

Rust is the 5th language I'm learning seriously. First was Python, then C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, and C. I've dabbled with Java, and wrote a bit of Lua, but not enough to say I know them. But throughout all these years, no language has blown my mind as much as Rust has, and I'm just getting started.

Software Dev Log 6

I'm not sure if I'm just falling into a slump or my mental health isn't doing well this month (like how it does every few months), but I haven't done much in the last 2 weeks. I also have real life stuff to blame, like how I was extra busy with work and preparing for an anniversary with my girlfriend, but nonetheless I haven't been feeling too hot. I think I should be getting back on track starting today(22nd) and be productive again.

Software Dev Log 5

Here I am on a streak of being on time. Studies are going smoother everyday, and I'm loving it.

Software Dev Log 4

I'm on time again! Well, a day late, but better than taking a month.

Software Dev Log 3

It's been a bit more than two weeks, but still this is a good time to write this. I don't have much to say for most of the weeks, but I made some big progress in the last few days and I'm excited to share it.

Software Dev log 2

It took almost a month to finish writing my first log, which is not really ideal when the plan was to write about once a week or two. It's not as easy when you aren't used to writing, along with trying to pack it in a pretty busy schedule between 5:30 AM to 9:40 PM. The progress on the projects and studies slowed down as well trying to write this, so it wasn't particularly a productive month. Hopefully I get this done quicker this time.

Software Dev Log 1

It's a little weird to call this series a dev log, because I'm far from developing anything at the moment. I'm currently working on two things;

Python UI Development, D-2

I learned a bit of the widgets last night, and today I tried and see if I could separate the widget initialization in to its own method from `MainWindow.__init__()`. Long story short, it didn't work. Not only did it not work, my whole UI didn't launch at all, as if all the other widget I didn't even touch also died somehow. I don't know - I'll think more about it at some point, but it doesn't seem necessary anyway.

Python UI Development, D-1

Today isn't the first day I attempted to learn UI Development. My first attempt goes few months back with **Tkinter**. Quite quickly, I had hard time with the tutorial I found; It was horrible now that I think back to it, and unhelpful keeping my motivation going. Later on I decided to jump on it again with a bit more research on UI libraries, which landed me on **PyQt5**. This library was so much more modern and intuitive, and QtDesigner was quite a surprise. But within an hour I figured that I want to learn how to _code_ my UI, not have a software do it for me. The tutorial I was watching mainly focused on QtDesigner, so I stopped again.

Fruit Fly Genome Mapping - Epilogue

I've been off this project long enough that anyone can consider it over from my last post. And well, it was. I wrote and completed my thesis on it, presented it in front of all other contestants and judges, and received an award for being above average.

Fruit Fly Genome Mapping - Day 23

As you can see with the spacing between each entry, I am a terrible student researcher. Perhaps the fact that only 4 was successful got me demotivated. Maybe I was just waiting for my teacher to buy some kind of food for the fruit flies, instead of buying them myself. Perhaps it's all of what I said. Nevertheless, I neglected my fruit flies for a total of 9 days. As I walked towards the lab, I almost gave up on everything, thinking about other topics I could easily experiment in a short time to replace this failure of an experiment. There are some excuses, such as the National Exam, and the other things I just mentioned, but I still am in the wrong for not taking my experiment seriously.

Fruit Fly Genome Mapping - Day 7, 8 & 14

I reported the results I got on Day 6 to my teammates, and asked for their help on this day. We spent the day cleaning all tubes clean of food and maggots, and placing fruits in them. A BentWing Type and a Wild Type was found dead, or at least not awake till this morning, so we replace them too.

Fruit Fly Genome Mapping - Day 2 & 6

I (Sim Ho) came to school as early as possible to check on the problems we had on the first day. As I've said before, many who we thought died of overdose of anesthetic woke up, except a Wild type, and two female YellowBody type. I had no fruit available at home to provide the clean tubes food, which was going to be a problem. Fortunately, one of the tubes I named '???' is empty of fruit flies, just left of food. I named it '???' because I had no idea what combination of fruit flies were in there. It took me a while to realize there are none. I scraped a good portion out of the tube and shared it among the tubes with no food, where fruit flies immediately stuck their mouths to.

Fruit Fly Genome Mapping- Day 1

Our package arrived about a week ago, but we haven't touched it till today due to various reasons.

Fruit fly Genome Mapping - Introduction

**Hello, we are the Student Genetics Research Group!** I assume you are either a teacher, evaluating the work our team did for the mini-thesis competition, since I'll have linked this English version on the Korean one. Or you are me. There is a chance mathematically that you are a random person on the internet who randomly stumbled upon my blog, but I don't think it's significant enough to count.