GO GO GO and E2C2

Everyone in life is just GO GO GO right now. All of my friends (including me) are worried about getting jobs. Companies are only taking the best of the best. We are all trying to outdo each other by join clubs and starting initiatives. I'm doing the best I can too. Thinking clearly about your future is difficult when you are only considering the short term. I realized it will be alright if we don't get jobs this summer. Assigning success to getting a job, is not the full picture. Our career will span much more than just a 8 or 4 month work term. I admit a job would be a step in the right direction, but it does not ensure success. Success comes from persistence.

A river cuts through rock not because of its power but because of its persistence.

E2C2

I did a hackathon last saturday, it went from 8:30 AM to 8:30 PM, it was so much fun. I realized why I chose electrical engineering. We built this device that mounts on to your door, it will sense how many people are inside the house with two sensors. Basically you hit sensor 1 and then sensor 2, it means you are going inside the house, or you hit sensor 2 and then sensor 1 it means you are going outside the house. We would count the amount of people inside the house, and when all the people leave it will turn off the thermostat, and the lights. Once you enter the house, it will turn on the appropriate lights and the thermostat according to the temperature outside. Its like have climate controlled seats if you have a fancy car, instead you have a fancy house.

At the end of the day, we didn't get all of it to work, we built basic functionality where the lights turn off when there's no people and lights automatically turn on when you enter the house. We made the case out of cardboard and it looked like a middle science fair project. During the making of this project, we had lots of roadblocks two big ones. First we couldn't write figure out the logic for the 2 sensors sensing direction, honestly looking back, it was a very easy solution, but it was harder to implement in C, coming from javascript I was actually relying on the debugging powers of languages that are high level. I realized I had a big gap in my coding skills if I switched to a low level language like C. But we finally figured out the logic, and it was like PURE JOY, I can't describe it was like, we did it,. It felt so good, it brought me back to the days when I was learning how to make websites when I was aorund 12- 14 and I'd have to debug my code. It felt reconnected with a piece of me that hadn't figured anything out for a long time. For the past couple years I hadn't learnt anything new. I was just making projects for people, using code that I already knew how to write, there was barely any challenge. It felt so boring, and I started to hate coding , every single time it was just annoying coding someone else's website. I feel like I found my direction within Electrical Engineering or atleast one piece of the puzzle.