Most exciting news of the week is that I’ve received my travel exemption so I’ll be visiting my partner in Canada for Christmas! It definitely feels weird to be planning intercontinental travel at the moment, and there’s still plenty of things that could go wrong between now and then, but I’m incredibly excited to see her. Feeling very lucky about the entire thing.

Things are picking up on the course at the moment. I have a lot of coursework to juggle over the next 6 weeks, particularly now i have a slightly advance deadline for completing them, but I’m chewing through the pile. The main sticking point at the moment are two particularly meaty pieces for a Software Engineering course. The deliverables are all about the process rather than the product. It has been a good learning experience so far, exploring agile methodologies for working. I’m currently finishing up a report on agile processes, after which we have a group project to build a game. Currently thinking we’ll do something quite simple with Pygame, but all of the learning objectives are around the process of working with the group, so that takes some stress out of writing the code.

Aside from that, I’ve been working on the foundations of computation, which involves a lot of state machines and the transition from finite automata to regular languages and back. This course begins with deterministic finite automata and ends with writing a parser, the first step along the way to a compiler, so it’s satisfyingly low level. The teaching is fantastic, and it’s immensely satisfying to work with mathematics where things are solvable, or there’s a right answer. It’s nice to deal in relatively objective material every now and again.

My driving test is in under two weeks now. This week was my first time driving in the rain. We’re descending back into the typically disgusting British winter. The clocks go back tomorrow evening. Things are slowly happening one by one. I’m not really reading many books at the moment, that’s a practice I’d like to get back into. I’m sitting in front of my computer and chewing through a lot of articles, it leaves me feeling the sugar rush of what’s happening and I’m not sure I’m gaining much from any of it. It’s good to have breadth, but I worry about convincing myself I’m an armchair expert, running around spouting shit. Well that’s fixable anyway. Just have to sit down and do the work.

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Reading List