The End of the Tunnel

Lately I’ve been feeling like there’s been a shit-ton of stuff going on, quite a turn-around from the last time.

One course about data structure and algorithms (super fun to be honest) has wrapped up. We thought we were ahead with the assignments but in the end it got very stressful. I sat up pretty late trying to optimize our code from 0.16 to below 0.15 seconds and it almost drove me crazy…

My last resort was to convert all strings to integers and do some funky bit shifting operations but it got too late so I had to go to sleep before making it work correctly. Of course I couldn’t sleep and I lay and thought about all the things I didn’t do or where I could’ve messed up. I woke really early, couldn’t sleep, and I went to fix it before our presentation that morning and look and behold! It was fixed in less than 15 minutes and it was blazingly fast! It’s funny how sleep or a nice shower can solve almost any problem you have, except hunger I guess.

While this was going on I also took part in a competition of some sorts in connection with the course. There was a programming problem after each lecture that we had to complete and the goal was to get as few hours as possible after the problems were released. Most problems were quite easy but there were a few hard ones. One I also lost some sleep over! But again I woke up and had to run to the computer to try to solve it… At least I won some money for some lovely new books so I guess it was worth it.

We’re now finishing our other course, the one with the Java game that spurred me to wanna make more games, and I think I spent a bit too much time on that… The game turned out pretty cool, I will make a post about it tomorrow I think, but it was a level or two above the actual demands I think so we could’ve chilled and not stress that much. And now we only have to document it! Describe how all the classes work with UML and some blocks of text… Sigh.

And oh yeah, we had totally forgotten to write a project specification that was supposed to be handed in over a month ago and we had completely missed the deadlines for the other assignments in that course. Luckily the deadlines were only suggestions and our assistant was cool about the specification too so we survived with our head still intact.

It just seems so silly though. Why did we wait with the other assignments, I think I did them in one day or something, until the very last second? It seems like I’ve been here before, and I don’t like it. This time I had a bit more control over the whole situation but it’s still not quite good enough.

Anyway now when this is all finishing up I can start to relax again. But then the thought creeps up on me: what’s next?

I’m probably gonna program, make a game or two, go through a language, read some books, train a lot… Urr I’m getting all stressed out just thinking out loud like that!

No I need to relax. Maybe read some more manga? Yes, that is indeed a good idea…

manga…