The Journey Begins!
It’s been about three weeks since I’ve become a SIF and things are slowly, but surely starting up!
I’ve been assigned to two projects, 3D Atlanta and The Hoccleve Archive, along with the large-scale Planning Atlanta Photos Geotagging project. It’s my first time doing anything of the sort for all of the projects, but I’m definitely more than excited to start learning. As an unskilled sophomore undergraduate student, everyone seems extremely skilled and it is a little intimidating, but it’s also amazing that I’m able to work alongside such knowledgeable people.
Most of my time so far has been spent geotagging various photos, primarily concentrated on Auburn Avenue and Ansley Park (oh the gruesome hours spent looking through house after house in Ansley Park, but the satisfaction after locating the one). I walked into this fellowship hoping to become more involved about things in Atlanta, and boy, did looking through the same couple of streets over and over on Google Earth certainly check part of that off the list.
The Hoccleve Archive project looks like a lot of javascript, which I am familiar with but am rather rusty on to be honest. The last time I used javascript was for an early-summer project for a website I was building for the start-up I worked for, and even then, it was pretty limited. I’m happy to be using javascript again though and will definitely be brushing up on its syntax this week!
3D Atlanta, as the name suggests, requires a lot of 3D modeling, which I am not at all familiar with. The last time I tried to 3D model anything was in my senior year of high school, frantically trying to learn how to CAD for my robotics team. Unfortunately, that didn’t go as plan, but take that my high school robotics team (no spite, just regret that I didn’t get to learn all that I wanted to back then)! I’m now on the 3D modeling train and eager to learn! I’ll be starting off by making frames for Unpacking Manuel’s Tavern and learning under fellow SIF, Priyanka Tayi.
Hoping to not become too big of a roadblock with my lack of skill, I plan to learn a lot about back-end web development and 3D modeling this semester. About two hours ago, I downloaded Blender and will be spending an extremely wild weekend looking through tutorial videos.