It was really hot, now it’s back to relatively normal temperatures. The pendulum of British summer is swinging around. For the past two weeks I’ve been steadily making more progress on my dissertation. I started going down the rabbit hole of Cython, which really enjoyed. The performance improvements in comparison to plain Python are very impressive, particularly when you move full loops into the Cython files. It’s incredibly easy to get a project up and running with a boilerplate setup.py file. I don’t come from a C/C++ background but my few experiences with those have been a lot more awkward in keeping track of make files and libraries, particularly when implementing nested data structures. I’d like to be more skilled at that, but I don’t have enough time to get deep into the C basis while meeting the targets I need to for my dissertation as well.

Alongside my dissertation I’ve been auditing one of the undergraduate modules that runs through topics like multiprocessing, GUI development, and design patterns. It’s been very interesting to go through so far, and a real reminder that the MSc only has enough time to really pack in the fundamentals and provide a challenge to learn further. I’m spending today working on reimplementing a Sudoku solver I wrote in Python this past term in Java with a GUI interface. Always interesting to learn different quirks of a platform through a quick project while trying to get up to speed on different tech.

Starting to shoot out some job applications as and when I see approachable positions come up. Fingers crossed as those go out.

Reading List