My Second Year with SIF Begins

As my third year as an undergraduate Computer Science student begins, so does my second year with the SIF program. Currently, I am working on three main projects as well as finishing some things from a previous project!

Manuel’s Tavern
It’s been approximately a year since I’ve started 3D modeling. I still don’t see myself as an expert 3D modeler by any means, but I was reflecting the other day with other SIF members about how we went from spending a whole semester doing 4 frames to becoming able to complete walls in one semester, and maybe even in less time now. That, of course, is thanks to very generous guidance from fellow SIFs — particularly Jack Le, who has been working hard to bring our models to life in Unity and more recently, on Omeka. This semester, I’ve also been granted the honor of being able to teach 3D modeling basics in Blender to two new SIFs, Kristi Ford and Tabias Clements, and a guest to the SIF program, PhD student, Kateland Wolfe! We’ve only had one session thus far at which I went over the bare basics of keyboard/mouse controls, modes, extruding/subdividing, discussing different views and perspectives. Kateland and I will be working together on getting some frames made for the Main South Bar of Manuel’s Tavern this month. The Manuel’s Tavern team is also starting to get a lot more organized with our process and workflow; hopefully we have a lot to reveal at our next demo!

ATL Maps
I hadn’t blogged about it last year, but ATLMaps has become one of my main projects since last semester, Spring 2017. The project is especially fulfilling to me because I’ve been able to work on it from when we were all tagging maps to working a little bit on the development side before it’s launch date (on September 21st, 2017) and now working on it to develop it into an even bigger site for Atlanta history and information. My favorite part about working on this project is its flexibility in being able to encompass things that even someone not as history-inclined as me can get super involved in. Led by Ashley McNeil, the team has split into two categories — the content team and the development team. Luckily, I get to be involved with both teams! For the content team, I have been working on a layer called Technological Hubs More on the development side, I’ve been working on a timeline slider that was partially discussed by never happened last year. My drive to create the slider started when I was collecting information for Technological Hubs and felt that it would be very boring to just have a map of Technological Hubs that exist in Atlanta and that it would be much more impactful if I created a slider to show the migration of tech companies into Atlanta, making it the Tech Hub it is today! The slider is currently still in development, as is the Technological Hubs layer, but things are progressing smoothly.

Homeless Resources
Still a budding project, Homeless Resources is all about creating a secure database for the homeless members of our community to store their documents and whatever else safely due to physical documents being extremely easy to damage and lose. With this site, hopefully it will be easier for the homeless to apply for jobs, and whatever else because all of their documents will be easy to pull up and access! With such important documents being stored, the team will have to make security our number one priority and personally, it’s something a little new to me, so I am extremely excited to create a system so secure even Mr. Robot won’t be able to get in.

Hoccleve Archive
Being the only Hoccleve Archive team member from last year left (hope your endeavors are going well Priyanka, Zane, and Madison!), I have been tasked with moving the Hoccleve Archive from our old AWS account to the new one. Although I’ve only worked with AWS very briefly a couple times for hackathons, after a lot of exploring and playing around with AWS, I believe it should be quite an easy task and I can’t wait to get the Hoccleve Archive up again so everyone can not only access a very fascinating database of poems, but also get to use the extremely helpful tool Zane and Madison created last year.

Until next time!

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