plan for this week.- 10/21/18

Good evening y'all! I hope everyone had an amazing weekend and rested up.  I managed to catch some zzz's in this weekend, so I'm feeling refreshed and hyped for the week ahead.

This week shouldn't be too difficult, but the week after is a big yikes. I have a Calc 3 test on all the integration techniques we learned and a physics test on everything we've learned since the last test. This week is just gonna hopefully be a ton of grinding and studying so that I can earn a 4.0 for this semester.

Also, that same week the mobile app is due for showcasing, which actually surprises me because the time had passed by so fast. I did manage to get a great amount done so far, but there is still more to be done. For one thing, I haven't pulled the main code from my team's GitHub yet, and we were supposed to do it a week ago... and I have no idea how to do it, so I feel really awkward asking now for help when that was supposed to be done so long ago. I also have to work on the onboarding pages and I really haven't done that yet. I've been looking at this video so far:

but I haven't really dived into it yet, but that will be one of my main priorities to take care of this week. I definitely want to finish the onboarding pages by the end of this week, so that the week after, I can just spend my time on debugging and stuff like that.

In addition, one of my main goals this week is to go to the gym every day. This is kind of a big task for me because I usually only go to the gym twice a week on average, even though the gym is just a few steps from my dorm. I really do want to start taking care of my body better because I feel more confident in myself and more willing to get stuff done after I've worked out, so I'm really gonna try my best and see how it goes.

a picture outside the gym I took earlier tonight

I hope you all keep well this week and I'll talk to you all soon,

Your boy,

Azhar

College and SparkDev- What You Probably Did Not Care to Know About in the First Place

Hey everyone! It's ya boy Azhar with some fresh content (which is subjective), as promised.

For this post, I wanted to get everyone to speed with what I've been up to since the start of the semester. Then in later posts, I think I'll feel more comfortable with going more in-depth with what I've actually been working on and my progress thus far.

So my classes this semester are as follows: Calculus III, Programming I, Physics with Calculus I (Lecture and Lab combined), Honors Introduction, and Honors Seminar. Even though all the classes are interesting in their own way, I'm most interested in my Programming I and Calculus III classes. Calculus III is not really difficult, to be honest, but if you don't put in the work to practice the problems shown in class and do the homework, you can fall behind real quick. And it'll be hard to pick yourself back up once you've fallen. As for Programming I, however, the class is pretty laid back and allows for trial and error in class, which I find is essential for programming, as programming can be a really frustrating process. The class mainly focuses on basic Object Oriented principles, such as the basics of Strings, for-loops, if statements, and arrays. As I took AP Computer Science A, AP Computer Science Principles, and AICE Computing AS in high school, this class is for the most part really not challenging, but there are many things that come up in class that I've never seen before, including SWITCH statements and DO statements. Next semester should be more challenging, however, as I plan on taking Programming II, which focuses on topics including interfaces, basic data structures, and array lists.

Concurrently, I'm also a part of SparkDev, which is a program offered by UPE that allows students to work in groups and work on projects that allows them to learn new skills and gain hands-on experience. About a month ago, I was placed into the Mobile App Development Group and since then, my team and I have been working on an app called Perimeter, which will be a messaging app that allows people to talk to other people that are within a certain radius or in the same building them. The Mobile App Development was basically split into two sections: the Android Team and the iOS team. Since there was no way I was gonna download a massive emulator to run Swift on my Windows computer, I chose to be on the Android team. Each person has a certain part of the program that they need to create and by the end, everyone's code will be stitched together to create the two versions of the app.

The project leaders of our team allowed us to choose what part we wanted to do, so I chose to work on the Login, Onboarding, and Sign-Up pages, with my assigned partner Dayana. So far, I am more or less finished with the login page and now I need to work with Dayana to create the other pages we are responsible for. We have until early November to finish our parts, which gives less than a month to create our parts. This actually is not a ton of time to work with, but with hard work and dedication, I think we can more than get our parts finished.

what the login page looks like so far

That is all for now; I plan to post soon on my progress on the app and updates on my life. :)

Thank you for reading

-Azhar

welcome to the jouney!

Hey everyone! Welcome to my very new blog! My name is Azhar Ali and I am a freshman at Florida International University (FIU) studying Computer Science and Mathematics. I was born in Trinidad and Tobago and my family and I moved to Broward County when I was seven years old, where I've been living ever since.

Currently, I am focused on getting that phat 4.0 GPA as I take 17 credits this semester and I am a member of several clubs, including Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).  In UPE specifically, I am participating in one of its branches, called SparkDev. I'll explain more about SparkDev in future posts. Other than academic life, I like to play video games (PC and Nintendo Switch), reading (particularly autobiographies and science fictions novels), working out, watch superhero television shows (right now I'm going through season 4 of the Flash), and hang out with friends.

Below are the programming languages that I have some experience in, and my level of knowledge in each of them:

• Java (Intermediate)
• JavaScript (Intermediate)
• Python (Beginner/Intermediate)
• HTML/CSS (Beginner)
• SQL (Beginner)

I'm so excited to be starting this blog because I want to track my journey in to the programming world. I am super interested in programming and I want to gain as much experience and know as much as I possibly can in the field of computer science.  I want to use this blog as a format to document my projects and as a platform to brainstorm and share my ideas. I also want to share the process of how I do this as I progress so that other budding programmers can learn from what I know.

Anyways, I just wanted to quickly introduce you all to this blog and explain my goals for this blog. Again, I am super excited to be going on this journey with you guys. So, without further ado, the blog!

- Azhar