First Summer Month Review

Happy Memorial Day! A lot of stuff has been happening this month and, honestly, I forgot that I was supposed to keep my blog posts going this month and thought I had a whole month off. Because of this, this will be an extra-long blog post that will detail what all has been happening this month. This ranges from finishing up my classes, to summer housing, to the things I’ve been doing at work. Overall this month has been hectic and thus stressful, but everything has calmed down a lot more recently, so that’s relieving.

School

First of all, I worked hard to make sure I ended all of my classes with A’s this semester, so I worked tirelessly night after night working on my various projects and resubmitting assignments that I didn’t have full credit for.

For Robotics, my project partner and I were working on the final project and about to start working on videoing everything when it all suddenly broke. The robot would no longer run any programs. The next morning we got a new robot body from Dr. Ferrer, and then our tablet wouldn’t connect to the robot. After hours of trying to get it to we called it a night and messaged our professor that we couldn’t get anything he suggested to work, so we would be in his office that morning as well. Then, that next morning, the morning of the project presentation which was in the afternoon, and we were getting a new tablet from him. From then on we finished up the project, edited together our video and powerpoint, and had a great final presentation. Our issues with Craig, our robot dog, ended up making the presentation much more lively.

That day I also worked on my Personal Finance project which was much easier. It was something we had been working on throughout the year, so I just had to put a lot of information together and make some decisions on where I would live based on job opportunities.

For my Thursday final project presentation I had Programming Languages. Now, this project was one that I was kind of nervous about doing well on. It took us a lot of time to actually get everything started and wrapping our heads around what we wanted to do, but then we finally settled on making an extension to a Haskell library that allows users to make sound wave. By the end of our project we were able to create some very interesting sounds very quickly. This is something that probably deserves it’s own blog post at some point since it is something that I can go into detail on. This has been one of the best group project experiences my project partner and I have ever had though.

Anyways, after a while of waiting I got my grades back, and they all ended up being A’s! All of my hard work paid off. After all of my grades were returned I ended up having to move down two apartments for summer housing, which sucked. I didn’t realize how much I had until I had to move it all. Over this summer I hope to get rid of some of the things I don’t need to making moving into my fall housing easier. At the very least, moving stuff back to my childhood home.

Acxiom

Now, the thing that I am actually supposed to be writing a blog post about, my internship. I’ve been tasked with multiple things so far this summer, including a dependency investigation. I was able to finish this for the time being, but I will be waiting for my coworker to update me if anything else needs to be done anytime soon. If not, then that will be fine. I just want to know if I did something wrong. To go more into detail about this investigation, we have a lot of files that are constantly being rebuilt every night and we are looking for ways to make sure that it isn’t getting hung when it doesn’t need to. Therefore, I went through and made sure that if one of these sections had a dependency that it was still needed, or that if something mentioned a previous table that it did include that table as a dependency.

I also work on the Internal Website regarding the Digital ALP table. The goal was that I would have a new admin version of the table that allowed the user to edit the various LOADED_BY_USER, LOADED_BY_DT, LOADED_COUNT, and MATCH_COUNT fields. This table, however, looks the same for people that are not digital admins. Currently, this is all working as intended. It took me a while to figure out exactly how I would have to do this in my head though. I ended up having to make it use a completely different update statement instead of using the same ones that I’ve been using for the other tables, but that is no big deal. Once I started coding it all it wasn’t difficult at all.

Another thing I have been working on this month is making sure that all of the code is easier to read, is well commented, and has more of a standardized look to it. The base of this website was created by a coworker of mine that no longer works at Acxiom, and, while he did make comments and organized the files nicely, there was still a long way to go where readability and comments are concerned. As someone who has been training someone else with how to work on the website, I know that it is not easy for someone to just pop into this project and know what is going on in each file. Therefore, I took it upon myself to start combing through the code and standardizing it while I am making a lot of comments to explain what the code does and the decisions related to it. I started with my code, but I am hoping to just continue doing this between projects until I think that it is satisfactory.

One interesting thing that happened last week was that our parent company, IPG, came down to the Conway office for three days. This meant that Acxiom was constantly sending out emails to everybody saying that they had to be in office if they were able, so for those three days there were a ton of people in the office. It was kind of insane to see so many people parked outside and walking around the office talking to my coworkers. I really enjoyed it though. I thought it was nice.

Overall, this past month has been extremely eventful. There is of course a lot more that I could’ve added to this, but I figured that I shouldn’t write a whole novel on here. Life is always churning away, you have to take the time out of your day to take a break and slow down.

What’s Coming Up?

• Continue working on a better landing page for this blog.
• Change “Projects” page to be a portfolio.
• Edit all the pages connected to the WIP landing page.

TL;DR

• Got all A’s
• Moved into Summer Housing
• Worked on a few projects at Acxiom
• IPG visited Acxiom last week
• Much.. Much.. More..