Jeff Chan

Things I’m Working On

I must admit I’ve been very busy since the beginning of this year, and I’ve overlooked this blog. I guess part of it has to do with my lack of ideas on what to write about, so during this time of inactivity, I’ve come up with some great topics that I’ll be writing about these upcoming months.

So what have I been working on lately?

• Botball Robotics: The season started off in end of February and ends with a competition on April 19th. We’ve went through the whole brainstorming and building process and now we’re focusing on the programming. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re using a language derived from C to program. The language itself is considerably powerful in our case but I must say robotics programming is like no other software programming. When we do web development or software development on the computer, we just compile/save and refresh the application to see if it works. However, the most redundant part and annoying part about robotics programming is that you have to constantly reset the 10′ by 8′ game board, running all over the room, only after one trial. Imagine doing this hundred or probably thousands of times. But this year is different than last year. I’m come to enjoy working with other programmers. It’s so much easier to split up the tasks, rather than having one-man-do-it-all.
  I’m keeping my hopes high for first place, but regardless of what place we get, I’ll still post the results here :P.
• Google Lunar X Prize R&D Challenge: The whole team worked very hard on this and I think our hard work payed off! We earned second place. We were asked to design a rover that would travel the moon. The challenge is indeed inspired from the Google Lunar X Prize Challenge, except in this case, we’re just designing the robot, not building them.
• Work: I’ve had a chance to continue developing products with a startup in New York. We’re working with the MyBB platform, so I had made several enhancements to the software that I may release in the future.
• USACO: Mgccl’s blog post led me to this competition. I thought since the training course was free and quite interesting, I’d give it a shot. I’ve completed two assignments in C but it’s been a real pain, especially dealing with pointers and strings. Everytime something compiles wrong, it makes me want to use Java more… Supposedly, if you do well in the compeitions held by USACO, you can move on to the International Olympiad in Informatics which is considered the field goal for high school students in computer science… I don’t see myself there any time soon though.
• Course Selection: Speaking of Java, it was course selection week a few weeks ago at my school. I’ve decided on what I want to take next year. The AP classes I’ll be taking are AP Computer Science, AP US History, and AP Calculus AB. It’s really two AP classes for me because APCS isn’t that much of a challenge for me. The other three regular classes will be English 3, Biology, and Spanish 3. They’re basically required by colleges as must-take courses. There is no way in the world I’ll be taking an AP English class, and don’t even mention biological sciences — I hate them.
• WordPress: I’ve been back on track, working closely with WordPress, especially after the 2.5 release. I’ve reworked our robotics team website. Everything is now powered by WordPress. In the summer, I’ll be enhancing this site with some custom WordPress plugin ideas I have.