One of the most useful classes I took during my time here at Penn State was CMPSC 431W: Database Management Systems. Amazingly, this is one of two classes offered by the CS department here on databases, and it is not required to graduate. The only required class isn’t a database class, but a Java programming class that teaches students about basic SQL since one of your projects uses JDBC to connect to an extremely rudimentary database and requires basic knowledge of implicit joins and creating tables with a GUI. So, for a while, I thought databases were easy and once you knew how to type SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ...; you knew all that a non-DBA needed to know about them.

I recently updated the theme on this blog, and in the course of doing so I realized that I had not posted on it in the year 2017. The last time I posted about something software related was over two years ago. I then realized that this sort of defeats the purpose of having a blog as a software developer. So here I am, a tad over a year later, reflecting on 2017 and—like many people—how to better myself in 2018. I realize the terrible cliché that I’m starting to tumble into, but bear with me here.

Last year, my friend Dylan made a Facebook post showcasing what he thought were the best albums to come out in/that he discovered in 2015. I thought that was a cool idea, so here are my favorite new (or new to me) albums from 2016. If you want more info on the album, hover your mouse over the album’s tile (albums that came out prior to 2016 have their year indicated).

In the course of developing a hybrid app with the Ionic Framework, I ran into a strange bug: the app would display data grabbed from a JSON API backend perfectly on my desktop web browser, through the ionic serve --lab command, and on the iOS Simulator. But for some strange reason, the space on the Android app where the data was supposed to go was blank on the Android emulator.

I think I just won the award for the most stupid, overly minimal app ever created. It was a rough fight, and I faced some seemingly insurmountable competition (the app Yo, for instance). But I think I just may have won.