April was weirdly long and short at the same time. With most of my exams being online and open-book, it was rather hard to get the motivation to properly study. But I eventually got into a good rhythm and adapted to this new way of life.

The CPSC 210 final project showed me one thing: your program can work really well on the surface, but be a bit of a trash fire underneath. One of the last things we had to do was a full UML diagram of our classes, and many of my data classes were so tied to everything else that my diagram was almost unreadable. Also, maybe don't try to recreate the full List/AbstractList/ArrayList class set, complete with subviews, a week before final submission! I'll probably clean it up a bit and turn it into an Android app once I've learned more about Android app development.

I also spent some time on the BattleSnake Stay Home And Code competition. I have the beginnings of a decision tree snake made, though it definitely can't do much. I also worked on a ML snake after watching the workshop by a team from AWS, but I still don't really understand practical ML yet. (Something to learn later!) I entered that snake in the competition, but didn't make it out of the first round. Fortunately, I wasn't the worst!

I've also been playing a lot of Animal Crossing, and it's been a good relaxing time. I especially love the museum! It's a beautiful and well-crafted environment. I really need to get a tight friend group in it though, so I can make use of the Best Friends features. I'm also loving how the community has made outside "services", especially around the Turnip market. It's getting into some real "Uncut Gems" territory.

(If you're playing, I made some "merch" for the UBC CSSS and BCS societies. Use my creator code MA-3165-0272-2796 to check them out!)

In terms of the pandemic, BC has been doing fairly well, all things considered. Daily cases haven't dropped as fast as anyone would like, but they're stable, so the province is apparently planning for some rollback of the lockdown. I've been checking a graph I found from this MinutePhysics video that does a good job of showing where we are in the pandemic trajectory. It's been giving me a clearer picture, which is really helpful in an environment that easily feeds anxiety.

May's the start of Summer Term 1, and I'm taking CS 221 (Data Structures and Algorithms) and CS 213 (Computer Systems). That's a pair of really hard classes even in a normal term. I'll let you know how that goes next time. (Pray for me!)