A summary of Summer

I’ve had a very busy and fairly productive summer, so in this post I’ll be summarising what I’ve been up to! After finishing my university exams and coming back home for the summer, I was pleased to learn that I’d scored 77% overall for my first year. My first year mark doesn’t actually count towards my degree, but it’s a good reassurance that yes, I indeed can do computer science!

ScraperWiki kindly invited me back to work for them this summer, so after a couple of weeks of rest I started work there. You can read all about that in my Of course most of their software is open source, so you can see all the code I wrote! After settling in I was introduced to the first project I’d be working on. I wrote about this in a separate post, which you can read here.

I also worked on some other projects, the main one being replacing the code being used to access the database in scrapers running on the ScraperWiki platform. This isn’t yet deployed, but you can see the progress here.

Overall I had a great time at ScraperWiki, it was good to be doing productive work and certainly nice to get so much experience with Go, a language I’d heard about quite often previously and which I am now fairly enthusiastic about. I’m currently working on an app to provide a better way to browse YouTube subscription feeds, solving one of my own problems, and I chose Go to write the majority of it. You can expect to hear more about that project soon, when I get it to a minimally working state.

This summer I also went on holidays to Portugal with my parents and Rome with my girlfriend Sophie, and had a fantastic time during both. I’ll be heading back to university in a few weeks and there are some very interesting looking modules in second year, such as ‘Vision and Graphics’ and ‘Systems and Compilers’. I’ll also be learning C for my embedded systems project, which I’m told will make me miss several things about Go, such as garbage collection. And so this concludes the end of my summer update, I’ll be looking forward to getting back to university and will hopefully make some more blog posts then!