This is it. If everything goes according to plan, I will have finished all of undergraduate work before I go to sleep tonight. After this, I guess the "real" world. Though something tells me I've been in the "real" world all along.
I am pretty excited to move on, start new things, get some sleep. It has been a rough ride to get here. Only a few hours left to go.
I just came from the CS computer lab where we put together our final tarball to send to the TA. It was a good time. James brought donut holes and we sat around and talked and laughed while we compiled all the files together.
I am happy with our team, and the way things worked out.
So we placed second in the class. I have to honestly say that I am very surprised. It is not that I didn't think that our project was good, but I thought the other projects were amazing. Then again, those teams said similar things to me too.
It was a good feeling to see the work you've spent so much time on appreciated, and to have everything come together. I think we are all pretty happy with how it turned out.
We are currently in the process of preparing for our final presentations on Tuesday, and a seemingly trivial question is leaving us stumped, "What to wear?". We all don't really have any idea how to dress for these things. We know that how we present ourselves can often play a major role in how well our product is received, but we don't know what attire matches our goals. Our initial thought was of course "suits", but not everyone in the group owns a suit. On the other hand, the Google guys usually wear cargo shorts and t-shirt, the natural look of a young hacker these days. Is that what business people want to see?
During the process of deploying our application for on AWS, I ran into an interesting issue that we had yet to encounter during the entire development process, memory issues.
It turns out that the free tier of AWS gives you only 512M of memory. This is usually fine, unless you are using a memory hungry language like java (actually any garbage collected language will probably suffer performance issues with this little memory, there was a recent paper published on this. As it turns out the C people are right about garbage collection with respect to performance, however they are still wrong about a human being able to track garbage collection safely.). The last time we deployed the application, we didn't have any issues, but since then there have been some system updates, our code has changed, etc. We must have been very close to the limit last time, because the crash actually takes place on code compilation not runtime.
Anyway, to remedy this I had to upgrade our AWS server to the non-free instance. Thankfully this is only $0.044 per hour, so it won't break the bank.
So, this weekend we have been going through all the issues associated with actually deploying a production ready version of the application. This isn't the first time we have put the site up live, but this time we made extra sure that all the web related features we wanted worked correctly. Which, of course, they didn't.
By "web related features" I don't actually mean anything related to the code of the application, but rather the webserver, https, DNS, etc.
It is easy to see how so many servers can be misconfigured so easily, with the wealth of options and settings that one must tweak in order to get the behavior you desire.
I am uncertain how I will be able to actively participate in the final presentation of our project. For the first two trial presentations, I didn't say anything except my name. This isn't because I was not involved or didn't know what was going on, quite the contrary. However, we only have ten minutes and are already just about using up that time, and other people strongly wanted to be speakers.
In general, I don't really care too much about speaking, I just want things to go well. At the same time, being the only silent observer (Sonny drives the demo, so he isn't "observing") makes me look like the tag along member of the team.
But I keep coming back to the issue of time. I don't wish to "steal" parts from my teammates, and I certainly could add more to the content being presented, but where do we find the extra time.
The idea that we are currently floating, is to have me perhaps do the conclusion. But with the way things have gone, that is still basically nothing. Something like, "And that's Mechanapp, revolutionizing expert system based auto repair!". I mean, it will actually probably be at least three sentences, but it won't be much.
Hmm... what to do...
