Tech. Todo and Wanttodo
By Jonathan Lam on 01/04/18
Tagged: brain-dump
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A lot has happened since the last post. It's been the life of December break. This mostly means writing and rewriting most of my college essays, going back to school, bowling, a math meet, and shoveling. (Today's a snow day, and tomorrow will be too!)
But in the world of tech, there's a lot of good stuff going on as well. Unfortunately, I missed two hackathons because of college apps or because they would interfere with finals. I've updated my personal website, with a few optimiations and style edits. And in the near future (after college apps and finals finish), I have so many ideas in mind that I have written down in my notebook, including but not limited to: finishing up the Safe Rides Website, revamping the Barlow Bowling website, and writing a new, creative blog BABAP. More on the last one later.
There are also many other, smaller projects that I'd like to revisit and wrap up. Apply what I've learned in the last few years to fix Periodic Letters, Flappy, Pop the Lock, Speller, etc. Put them at a level that is presentable to the world.
And outside of my past projects, I'd also like to make a portable Raspberry Pi voice control, Raspberry Pi calculator (that is much cheaper than the standard graphing calculators on the market today), initiate a business for tax reduction purposes, and so much more. And I've begun studying or re-learning Angular 2, a popular JS framework; Bootstrap, a common JS/CSS styling tool; and Java 9, to be able to push the limits of building large-scale past web-applications. I can't wait to begin learning these officially in college!
And I've discovered a few things in the coding world today that I had to write down. First, Font Awesome 5! I'm using it only on my personal website at the moment, but I'll bring it into play when the need arises.
Secondly, Brackets, which I've only experimented with in the past at its buggy dawn many years ago, has become more amazing and slightly less buggy! "Less buggy" as in I took about an hour trying to get its 2015 extension brackets-terminal to work, which was eventually successful and very satisfying. That was frustrating because an issue was opened on it in GitHub (as well as with the installation) two year ago, without any follow-up. Luckly I found a simple workaround, which was very irregular (I later figured that out, too) but very satisfying. One of my teammates was using it during StuyHacks in December, so I thought I'd give it another try. edit: I'm actually using Brackets right now to transcribe my posts, as it has an extension markdown-preview and looks very sleek with the Tomorrow Night theme. It's great!
And lastly, a Meta Stack Overflow post revealed the potential dangers of special unicode-characters, such as zero-width spaces, when copying and pasting code. So I'll make sure to be careful with that.
edit: Also, Java 9 is out! I remember the excitement when Java 8 came out. I don't remember exactly what I was excited about, because the main difference I knew was that Java 8 came with lambdas, which I didn't understand then. But Java 9 has been out since the fourth quarter of 2017, and another version is estimated to come out in March (Java 18.3, a.k.a. Java 10)! Java 9 comes with cool features like a REPL interpreter (finally!) and improved modularization (to avoid the mess with JARs and classpaths, thank goodness). I'm very excited to look into it again. I'm aiming to re-read through the Oracle Javadocs from the start, retrace the footsteps that led me into this addictive mess of coding knowledge five years ago.
So that's all for now, folks! I have so much (real) content in mind for future blog posts, and I hope to transcribe them ASAP. I have a huge todo list for high school, college, and code commissions. But I have a much larger want-todo list, and I can't keep up. I can't wait for the summer and college!
edit: Most of these recent essays were written some time between the beginning of December break and now. I've only found the time to transcribe them now. I've adjusted the dates on the blog to the date of composition (rather than today's date, the date of transcription).
Edits made at time of transcription: 1/13/18