Last quarter I wrote a character-learning software for my Mac programming class and since it was a project that I really wanted to work on – in fact, probably the first project I've done for a class that I actually wanted to work on as opposed to being forced to work on it for a grade – I continued working on it all throughout the one week spring break and up until now. Our professors for that class had told us that they would organize a Demo Day at Apple Campus where we could show our projects to Apple engineers and get feedback from them, and that Day happened to be today. Basically, we went to Apple, hooked up our computers and loads, loads and loads of Apple engineers came by and asked for a demonstration. I have to say that it was really fun and encouraging. First of all, I had this bug in a class called
NSLayoutManager and what ho, here's the guy who works on it who wants to see my project; after I demo it to him, I tell him about the bug and it's solved within seconds. Awesome! Secondly, hey, it feels good to be appreciated and I liked how people were impressed by (a) the software itself, and (b) how short a while it took to take the thing from scratch to where it is now. There was an engineer who asked me, "How many months did it take you to make it?" "Two and a half weeks," I said.
Here are some screenshots of the software itself, which is called Liànxí (means "practice" in Chinese):
Also, it's finally been decided that I'm taking three Computer Science courses towards my CS major this quarter – networking, introduction to artificial intelligence and computer security. I'm also continuing my Chinese, although I've shifted to the bilingual class which meets only thrice a week instead of all five days and, as the name implies, mostly consists of native speakers of the language. Finally, I have to make a decision about a class to take towards my Chinese major – there's the History class about the Qín dynasty, towards which my interest is very questionable because I really, really don't care about Chinese history and their twenty gazillion empires; anyway, the more interesting class that I'm possibly taking is a Chinese Literature class which as I found out today is
taught completely in Chinese! It was a fun experiment – I discovered that, at least at this level, I was able to understand most of what the professor was saying (as long as I'm paying attention), but there were a lot of characters in the reading exercise I didn't know. So, I have to decide in the coming few days whether taking this class would be an act of boldness or foolishness, and whether I should stick to classes taught in English for now instead of reading novellas written by twentieth century Chinese authors.
Labels: English
