just a comma

In my first blog post, I mentioned what I hope to learn in CS3216:

1) Learn new stuff

The learning process has been fun. Lots of stuff to play with which I am ashamed to say I have not touched before despite having existed for quite a while. Most satisfying moment was probably when my AJAX requests to the server worked. Instant high!

2) Challenge myself as much as possible

Indeed this has been a very challenging module. Coding wise, I have to get things done in short amounts of time without much prior experience. Time management wise, I have to juggle between this, CS3103 weekly labs and various assignments, not to mention Lions and their urgent emails. In the process I had to neglect some things, like Maths :p Last but not least, there were the situations where I had to be involved in project management as well. The opportunities were not abundant, but nevertheless precious.

3) Meet other people

CS1101S has, in a way, created a little enclave of sorts, because since then I have taken my CS projects with practically the same group of people. CS3215 was the first CS module I did a project without them (although in the end, I still ended up with a group of Schemers -.-).

The nice thing about working with friends is that we already know each other well, so it is easy to do projects with them. CS3216 is evil, because I was forced to work with new people. As I have mentioned in my previous entry, I am slow in warming up to strangers, but without time on my side, the projects had to continue. Fortunately, I feel things didn't turn out too bad.

Of course, not to say its a bad thing. Thanks to the rule on rotation of project mates, I met many interesting people, programmers and non-programmers alike, and they all have been great to work with. I hope I have done an okay job in all my projects; to those who didn't feel the same way as I did, I apologise for any shortcomings.

Oh just to mention, thanks to CS3216, I had the opportunity to work with my classmate from Anglican High again, where previous teamwork encounters were limited only to the field of soccer (pun unintended).

As repeatedly stressed upon by The Prof, CS3216 is about execution. This hit my final project group especially hard in our faces when we rolled out our web portal and no one uses it. I think its better now than when it was first released, but there's still plenty to do, and we have all learnt a lesson the hard way.

Like someone else, I like C and C++ too, and I used to dream of joining a company to make "big chunky games in C++". Unlike someone else though, I think the Web has great potential, and one day, big chunky games can definitely be run off the Web. Who knows, it might just become a standard for game distribution. Whatever it is, the Web promises to be an exciting field, and one that I will definitely consider in the future.

All in all, the time spent in CS3216 has been very memorable, and I have no regrets taking this module as an UEM. Just like Yao Ming hoping that his retirement from basketball is just a comma, and not a full stop, in his life, I hope the end of this module is just a beginning and not an end to all of us.

May everyone continue to do what they love!