Writing

Learn these concepts before building a home server

I learned a lot throughout the weeks I spent fiddling with this tiny computer. This was the first time I created a Docker container and did any sort of network administration. This post will go over the challenges and requirements of a home server and give an overview of the solutions and concepts I learned on the way.

2023 Reflection & 2024 Goals

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

Jobs are meant to go away

Then there are maintenance jobs. Farming tools improve over time, but the act of farming simply maintains the foundation of society, rather than move it forward. Most hospital doctors cure patients of known illnesses using known methods and tools, but do not discover new ones. Cooks, taxi drivers, lawyers, cashiers - all primarily exist to support existing infrastructure rather than build it. These jobs don't eliminate themselves.

Dev tools you should be using

Before that, I have to explain why I work with Windows instead of a Linux-based OS. The short answer is **simplicity** - Windows is what my laptop is built around, have the tools I need, etc. Did I spend many hours trying to migrate my workflow to Linux? Yes. Do I want to spend additional hours figuring out why my screen freezes *sometimes* specifically from mouse input? No.

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

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

Here are the topics of discussion for today's post:

Software Dev log 2

Ever since I started 'Bank Account Interest Calculator Development' I didn't touch on 'Kivy module study', because I was sure I'd get it over with in few days. Jokes on me, I'm terrible at focusing on one thing and now I'm almost two months in. ~However, I do have something other than 'Bank Account Interest Calculator Development' to talk about in this post;~

Software Dev Log 1

1. Kivy module Study

2. Bank Account Interest Calculator Development

Before I talk about them, I'd like to point out one important thing, and that is that these logs may contain smelly/wrong programming ideas harmful for beginners. Some will definitely be some concepts I only later realize is wrong or understand it truly. These logs are made public not primarily to teach anyone, but to receive feedback from others if they happen to stumble upon my posts. Though, that is not the main function of these logs, but rather to review the things I've learned over the course of my self-teaching.

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

So why am I posting this? Well, I don't enjoy studies at all, and I really have nothing else to do but that. Thinking through all the other things I could possibly do excluding games since I uninstalled all of them to study for CSAT, this came to my head.

Fruit Fly Genome Mapping - Day 23

While I was away from the lab, I decided that there is no point in bringing sugar and yeast. I didn't think it was too complicated to cook proper food for the fruit flies until I took a better look at the recipe. I decided to stick with bananas, the most popular simple food known to be given to fruit flies. I brought one today, hoping that the remaining four was still alive and that they haven't choked on parasitic fungus. That would've been cool, though, since I could also switch my experiment topic to something that's already complete.

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

One, none of the research members cared enough to take the fruit flies with them when the package came. Next day, I (Sim Ho) was told that they all died because we didn't take it home quick enough by our class teacher. He said that fruit flies don't live long, and that I should've conducted the experiments on that day. While my knowledge about fruit flies begged to differ, I wasn't happy to hear the result nonetheless. I felt that there was no need for a team if nobody was willing to help out, so I disbanded our group without a word, and looked for other cheaper things to research, as I have used up most of the funds I was given.

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.