Week five marked the first week that our giant 3-part web server was due. Being 4th of July weekend it ended up being hard to meet up with my team until Sunday, so we ended up trying to put everything together in 2 days. Once I got started, however, I didn’t stop. Seeing how everything is connected and configuring it has been amazing. From setting up the rackspace server, to choosing Django as a framework, serving it via nginx, and connecting the two via uwsgi this has been one of the most exciting and applicable work experiences I’ve had at UT.

So this week has definitely been interesting to say the least. I took both of Downing’s tests on Monday, tried to start a project group by Tues, became forced against my will to skip class on Wednesday and hang out with a friend who, by now, just finished moving to Dallas, had my group fall apart by Thursday, joined another group by Friday, spent all of Saturday (4th of July) coding, and finally celebrated 4th of July weekend a day late on Sunday.

It’s week three and one of the wierdest things to think about is that this class is about halfway done. Having never take summer school before, it’s currently blowing my mind. Six weeks might not sound that short, but after 18 years of semester long classes six weeks is flying.

Did I mention I’m taking Generic Programming and STL alongside of this for fun? Because these past couple of days have been a bit more stressful than fun. While Downing released the projects on Thusday, he didn’t really go over them until Friday, and with Father’s day on Sunday I have already had plans to go home. Thank god I decided to look over the specs one more time when I came home, because I didn’t realize he only gave us 4 days from when he went over the project to when it is due. Not only do I get to have fun cramming one project out, but I get two! Did I mention I’m also taking chem lab with the constant busy work? I’m really starting to miss the two weeks he gave us on Collatz now.

Week 1 of class and I’ve already got a full project done, started work on a side project (this website), and I’m apparently going to be writing a blog post a week for the rest of the class. Add in the fact that we’ve already begun using at least 6 important industry tools for coding and you’ll see why almost every Computer Science major at UT will recomment taking a “Downing course” taught by none other than Glenn Downing himself.