It’s been a little over a month since I’ve joined the SIF program, and I’ve never taken in so much information in such a short time.

The Hoccleve Archive project is progressing smoothly. It’s made me open my eyes to how inexperienced I am as a programmer — almost painfully so — but in return, it’s motivated me to learn a lot. Since being put on the project, I’ve learned GIT (something I’ve been putting on hold for a long time) and I’ve started looking into a lot of things like jQuery, JSON, and xPath. Let’s be honest, I barely knew what XML files were until about 3 weeks ago and this weekend, I’m sitting down and debugging 18 XML files! While I undoubtedly owe google many thanks, I probably never would’ve sat down and devoted many hours to learning all this information without this project getting me so pumped about learning. We’ve been working on creating the search functionality for the poems, which I hope from my learning how to program it, will help other scholars learn a lot from these poems.

Blender is rather addicting. As the featured photo for this post, I have made a broken coffee cup as well as many other things like a teddy bear, a chair, a table, a lamp, and more recently, a frame. I’m still having a little difficulty remembering a lot of the shortcut keys and have to refer to the guide I wrote for myself, but I’ve started to really have a lot of fun making things. While sitting down and staring at code for hours on end is fun, being able to visually see what you’re producing is pretty amazing also. Learning Blender makes me feel like I’m in high school again trying to learn After Effects for when I was learning motion graphics, and it’s a really exhilarating feeling when I have something finished and rendered. Just this past Thursday, I’ve also joined PantherHackers’s 3D Modeling interest group led by fellow SIF and PantherHacker, Wasfi Momen, and I hope be able to merge the knowledge granted to me from both the interest group and (as previously mentioned) from fellow SIF, Priyanka Tayi, to be able to 3D Model with excellence!

Hoping to continue on this pace of learning and having fun, I will continue to spend my days filling my brain to the brim with knowledge!