A Term’s End

I can’t believe how fast one term came and went. The past few months have been filled with some of the most interesting people and experiences I will never forget.

Going into my first term of university I felt a lot of stress about the unknowns. I didn’t know how hard the classes would be. I didn’t know if I would find my place. I didn’t know if the whole situation would work out. What I did know was that I was excited nonetheless, and in the end, it all worked out fine.

I learned a lot about people this term, especially the very motivated and talented people of the software engineering cohort. As someone who went to school in a less tech-focused region, it was refreshing to meet people who shared common interests. Whether it was talking about the latest Hacker News posts, the impossible job market, or the shared dread of ECE 105, the SE cohort became the group of people who I now spend the majority of my day with.

The DP library where I studied for exams 24/7

Perhaps one of my favourite events of this term was my SE 101 project UW Map. In short, UW Map is a webapp that allows fellow students to find their way around campus while avoiding all the traffic. We utilized ESP-32s to scan for nearby devices and then send that data to a backend which is then displayed on the frontend which was designed by me. I used Next.js and Mapbox to render the data points and also made custom graphs to display the hourly traffic in a certain area. Add some animations, dynamic colours, custom Mapbox layers and you have a simple dashboard that shows you where the busiest parts of campus are.

Working on a team to build UW Map was a really great experience and I am lucky to have worked with some really smart people. Overall, I think the project came out great. Some of us have even continued to make improvements this year. If you would like to check it out, it's live at uwmap.live. If you want to check out the code, here is the GitHub link.

The UW Map dashboard

In addition to this project, I have also been working on maintaining and updating my dark mode extension Calendar Dark Mode. I’ve made a small landing page website and now have almost 40000 users! Starting off as just a small project that I built, I can’t believe that it has garnered this much traction. I really love getting emails from people making suggestions for the extension and making it better as a whole. Reading people’s feedback has been very rewarding and it really drives my passion to make products that people like (and use!).

Also just to note, I can’t believe that I turned into the average UW blog where I just write for a little while and then completely ditch it for the sake of school. Looking back on this quote just makes me laugh.

I hope to do some more writing in the following weeks.

This second term seems to be chill so far so I hope that I will be able to do some more writing and get involved with some communities within the university. In addition, my co-op search (which I also hope to write about!) is currently ongoing so on the off chance that you are reading this and are hiring, please send me a message anywhere, linkedin or email.

Anyway thanks for your time and have a good one.