CS371p Fall 2018: Floyd Horng

Floyd Horng
Sep 9, 2018 · 3 min read

Week 2 (Sept 3 — Sept 9)

Hey there friend! I’m ecstatic to hear that you’ve stumbled upon my semester-long blog series! My name is Floyd Horng, your atypical 3rd year UTCS undergrad and former quantum chemistry researcher turned indie game developer. Throughout the semester, I’ll be detailing my exciting adventures in Dr. Downing’s Object Oriented Programming class and my life working full time on my own production games.

What did you do this past week?

My week divides evenly between on-campus and off-campus activities. On campus, Dr. Downing’s class has really started picking up: 40 pages of reading, daily quizzes that keep you engaged, and our first project. Additionally, I’ve continued my commitment to working out regularly that I mentioned in my previous post.

Off campus, I’ve resumed full-time work weeks with my co-founder on our production game. Each day I wake up at sunrise to ensure we have enough hours together in a voice call (he lives on the other side of the planet!). This week has been hyper-productive for us, and I’ve had the opportunity to build lots of cool tech such as our new in-game GPS navigation system that breaks our 3D virtual world into nodes where a path can be calculated via DFS. I’ve also had the interesting (and slightly uncomfortable and foreign) experience of interviewing a potential candidate for our budding engineering team.

What’s in your way?

The first thing that comes to mind is those daily quizzes. I definitely haven’t been doing as well as I’d like to on them, and I take full responsibility for not studying enough — more updates on this next week.

Additionally, waking up early has taken a toll on my productivity. I’m used to being a night owl, and going to sleep at 11:30 pm is not natural for me. I’ve been pretty groggy all week, but I’d imagine that this will change soon as I build stronger sleep habits.

What will you do next week?

I will be doing a lot more studying for quizzes — and not just immediately before class. In my experience, the best way to remember things is to sleep on it. This allows my brain to cement those memories in REM and more easily recall them in class.

What’s your experience of the class? (this question will vary, week to week)

Things are definitely starting to pick up in ways I appreciate and don’t. I love the short articles that Dr. Downing has been linking us to on his calendar. I’ve found them to be quite enjoyable and informative to read. On the other hand, the textbook has been a little slow, and I feel like those 40 pages of material could have been condensed into 10 or so pages by removing fluff. The quizzes require diligent studying and memorization, which is reasonable.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick-of-the-week is this aesthetically beautiful and simple-to-implement open source charting library called Chart.js: https://www.chartjs.org/

If you ever need to visualize data and aren’t great at UI design (like me!), then chart.js is a fantastic tool for adding charts to web pages. It’s invaluable for my dev team where we do a lot of data analysis and tracking.

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