OSD700 Preface

It's the weekend

January 15, 2022. The first of my 6th semester and it is looking like a heavy one.... Though it's fine, because who's classes better to power through no other than Dave's. When I saw that there were 2 classes being delivered by Prof. Humphrey, I stood my ground on the schedule builder and waited patiently for the first moment to claim my spot in his classes. 

I got into OSD700 no problem but had to apply for waitlist for the cloud computing class. To my luck, I eventually got in and acquired my carefully curated choices of 4 classes, which are very closely related in that the knowledge, and content found in each of them apply to the rest very synergistically. (P.S. the other 2 classes are Microsoft Azure Technologies, basically another alternative to AWS, and PRJ, our capstone project course in which my group are planning on building a web app)

OSD700 // WINTER2022

Boy oh boy, this course is gonna really test me to my limits, I can feel it. Let's start of a with a quick intro. I'm reviving this blog that was done in Fall 2020 for ODS600's follow up course OSD700. Since then though, lot of things have happened. Landed in an internship last summer for a startup company in my home country, Indonesia, and I finished the previous Fall 2021 semester with a lot more knowledge gained. 

I'm starting this Winter semester as optimistically as I can despite the winter depression looming. And the first week of class has been great, trying to stay on top of my game so that I don't fall behind waaaay too much, a mistake I made the previous semester... But that's okay because for OSD700, Dave basically told us to go out, learn and code. Which is fine with me since I made it a point to do that for myself the end of last semester. So thanks Prof, for making a course that's task is basically what I'm already doing, except this time I'm graded for it

GO OUT, LEARN AND CODE

So that's NOT a quote from Dave, but more so how I understood his instructions for this course. If OSD600 is HOW to go out learn and code, OSD700 is really doing that, while our trusty mentor/professor lends a hand and guides us from time to time. So here's what I got so far.

Jekyll -> Next.js

I started the Christmas break wanting to create something, with a new technology/framework I haven't tried. I thought about making a portfolio page and became really attracted to the idea of JAMstack sites. So I went with a popular choice for a jamstack framework, Jekyll. 

Jekyll is a simple, and easy to use static site generator, where you code your pages in markdown. Jekyll was really straightforward to learn and code, I took a template online, made some edits, and added a CMS to manage my blog component.

I then started thinking about the possibilities of expanding my website. A static site, though is very simple and straightforward, has some limitations that other stacks can do. So I started considering the other frameworks out there and really liked the flexibility of Next.js. Having the option to render web pages on server side, or statically, or date fetching from client side was exactly the kind of feature I like.

So I did the next.js tutorial gradually throughout the week, whilst refreshing my react knowledge, and now have a pretty decent understanding of it. And what do you know, the big project we're all going to have to contribute to for the course, Telescope, has it's front end written in Next.js

Telescope

Telescope as I've blogged about before previously, is an open source web app, where blogs from OSD/DPS students(both past and current) are aggregated into a feed. Not only do I want to work on it's front end with my newfound next js knowledge. But I do really want to work on it's back end. (I watched a Redis video the other day, and am really intrigued)

Back end Programming

I always thought that back end programming was super intimidating and perplexing. But I found out that that's not true from my time in my internship, working on the backend gave me confidence and enthusiasm to really hone my skills and become a competent full stack developer one day.

Conclusion

OSD700 isn't gonna be easy... But that's exactly the reason I took it in the first place. Would I have taken it if Dave wasn't the instructor? Debatable. All I know is that I'm expecting to be twice as better a developer by the end of this course, and I'm going to do all I can to make it so.

Thanks for the read.

P.S. If you noticed the slight change in style in writing from the OSD600 blogs, I'm trying to write more expressive, and creatively but still grounded in OSD700 content. Though, feel free to read my personal blog on my website! It's a little more personal, honest, but still centered around my life as a CS student and creative (my other side i'm reserving from the OSD700 blogs!) I made it gradually, during the break, so it's still very barebones. I might cross post, or post some excerpts from here on there.