End of Another Semester

Hello everyone,

I know I didn't write for a long time. A month or so after the start of the semester, I honestly couldn't manage my time effectively. Hence, I couldn't study any programming on my own. Since this was the first semester I spent at my university's campus, I hope I can manage my time next semester so that I can write to this blog more often, even if only to write about my lessons.

Anyway, I think I can summarize my second semester as a Bilkent CS major in terms of programming. Actually, my summer studies proved to be quite helpful. Most of the topics were similar to what I've studied before, like inheritance or searching & sorting. I was a bit confused at polymorphism, but I eventually got the hang of it. 

The most challenging topic of the curriculum was GUIs, in my opinion, because my codes got really messy really quickly, and debugging was really frustrating. Thankfully, my lecturer didn't include any GUIs in our exams. I probably could have written GUIs in exams, but it was a relief that I didn't have to do it.

The hardest part of the course was the group project which continued all semester. I had 4 teammates, sadly, 2 of them withdrew from the course. I got along well with my teammates, but the project we designed was difficult to write for only three people at our level. We developed an English learning app on Android, similar to Duolingo, but it had a separate learning part with a dictionary and flashcards. It was originally going to have a competition mode, similar to Kahoot, but after our group was down to 3 people, we removed that part. I was responsible for the testing part, and I think I did a good job. I managed to use Google Firebase Database to fetch questions and answers. (Sadly, our tests only have multiple-choice or open-ended questions. I eventually managed to combine the two question types, but my teammates didn't want to risk it.) Tests are used to determine the user's level after a new user registers. After that, when the user chooses "testing" in the application's main menu, they can select a test from the testing menu. 

It was hard to work on Android since we knew nothing of it (or the Database, for that matter) at first. On top of that, I have worked on Eclipse for almost two years now, and Android Studio is almost exactly the same as IntelliJ. This caused me to spend some time learning the IDE. Also, apparently, I forgot how to use GitHub, and trying to organize it at the end of the project was tedious, mainly because it became my responsibility entirely. Anyhow, we managed to finish the project on time with online login and question fetching, but our dictionary and flashcards were offline.

That's about all for my second semester in university in CS course, I plan to write another entry for my other courses. Currently, I'm studying C++ for my next course in my second year.

That's all I've got to say for now! See you,

Ece