Boys’ Brigade

Back in late September last year I started my first year at Aberystwyth University studying BSc Computer Science and now just over I month into my second year I think a retrospective of my time so far would be a good idea.

Before beginning my first year, having mainly been investing time in networking (taking the Cisco Network Academy CCNA course at my Sixth Form) and Linux, I had little experience with programming and was understandably a little concerned about this. But ultimately this has turned out very well, having finished my first year with final marks of 92% and 84% in the perspective programming modules of the first and second semester. Besides some Perl used in the first week or two of the first year for introducing very basic programming concepts, the primary language for the main programming modules at the University is Java; I’ve found the language to be great to work with and we were also introduced to the Eclipse IDE which I’ve used for the majority of software development since. In the first year the programming modules involved a number of assignments including a group assignment in which we developed an application for creating Cartoons in a Swing user interface, as several individual projects. In the main programming module in the second year our first assignment was focused on making good choices of data structure and designing an efficient algorithm. In the second year I have also opted to branch out by taking the ‘C and Unix’ module in the first semester and a module involving C++ in the second semester. Please see my ‘Portfolio’ page here where I have provided some samples of my work so far, including for the aforementioned assignments.

Aside from the main programming modules in the first semester of my second year I am also taking the Web Programming module which builds upon last year’s Web Development Tools module (which looked at XHTML, CSS and JavaScript), introducing PHP and its use with a database backend, primarily via the SQL language; the assignment for this module involves us writing a web shop in PHP which pulls data from a PostgreSQL database providng the user with the ability to add a chosen quantity of items to a basket before placing the order. Also in the first semester I am taking the Introduction To System And Network Services Administration which covers a wide array of topics around server and desktop hardware, Linux/Unix and Windows server software and administration in addition to network security; this module will be useful to cement my existing networking and Linux server administration knowledge.

As you can see with these and my other module choices for the second year I’ve tried to give myself a broad coverage of software development, web programming and system/networking administration. I think that the knowledge gained in all of these modules/areas will be applicable to most roles even if they specialise in a specific area.

Outside of University, in Boys’ Brigade having earned my Queen’s Badge last year, with my 20th birthday coming up soon I’ve decided to work towards becoming an Officer in my Boys’ Brigade company; I’ll start as a Warrant Officer and there’ll be training to organise at some point in the coming months where possible. On a related note the website I develop for the company is currently based on Drupal 6 and I’m looking to migrate to Drupal 7 in the coming months but I’ll first need to plan how to migrate camp/event pages from the Event module – which is no longer supported in Drupal 7 – to (most likely) a combination of the Date and Calendar modules; I’ve also recently created a Twitter feed, Facebook and Google+ pages for the company.