JS. Nelson, Software Developer

I had originally planned for this blog to be a repository of knowledge about the technologies that I work with every day. But, it has not become that yet. My last post was written on the day I started this WordPress account, and I haven’t written another post since. Over a year has passed and a lot has happened. I’ve learned a great many things about Human-Computer Interaction (my first OMSCS course) and tried my hand at redesigning the user experience of a mobile app (it went well enough to get my group an A on the project!). Now I find myself in Graduate Introduction to Operating Systems (GIOS). It’s my first class in the program with programming assignments and those assignments will be in C, which I have technically never used before (C++, Objective-C, even C# a bit, but not plain C). I’m nervous about the differences between C and its variants. It has been a long time since I really worked with pointers, but pointers are all over the code we’ll be writing. At least the worst that will happen is I’ll ruin my virtual machine and not my nice, new M4 Max MacBook Pro. I had wanted to try Apple’s Container platform and run my code in a container, but that’s not really available yet (I don’t want to run the macOS Tahoe 26 beta, and I’m not even sure I’ll install it on release day like I normally would.), so I am using a VirtualBox VM running Ubuntu 20.04 (the testing environment for the class). It’s a x86 VM running on my M4 so I’m not sure if that’s going to cause any issues or not. I’m hoping not, but apparently the arm versions of some of the libraries/tools we’re using don’t work right natively in macOS. It makes me want to update them, but I’m not sure I know enough/have the time to do so. I thought there was a point to this post, but I’m starting to think it’s just me rambling a bit about school. I’m really enjoying this program so far and I would recommend it to anyone thinking about getting a master’s in computer science.