The storm before the calm: finals week

I am sure all students can relate to how stressful finals week is!
Going to sleep at 6 am, and waking up at noon is now the new norm and has been for the last 2 weeks. I have been through many finals weeks by now, but this one is the most uniquely brutal. I underestimated the amount of work before signing up for all the difficult courses that I did in September.

The good stuff

Before starting release 0.4, I was stressed out! I was worried about finding a big enough issue that I could comfortably work on and make it before the deadline. But then I thought why not work on many small issues and challenge myself to do multiple pull requests.

I picked my favorite Seneca College project my-photohub and successfully created two pull requests there.

PR1: For the first pull request I had to integrate a previously implemented functionality github-upload into the rest of the application.

Next, I found another very interesting project bcgov/cas-cif This was a project by the government of British Columbia and I thought it would be nice to contribute to this project.

All I had to do as described below, was refactor and optimize the regex for emails and phone numbers across multiple files.

I also ended up doing a last-minute contribution to vscode-seneca-college extension repo for the issue regarding displaying user stats such as screen time and edits made per hour.

This issue required me to do some research and learn about vscode APIs. Since I had never done any vscode extensions before I had to study the documentation and look through some examples before diving into the code.

Endless learning

All of the issues I picked taught me something new. So far, my progress has been smooth without any major bugs or hurdles.

The struggle

Fitting in multiple assignments in a short time span is hard! This week has been about four things: open-source development, cloud computing, mobile app development, and robotics. I had very little time to dedicate to other courses. However, despite the hurdles and bottlenecks, I feel pretty good about my accomplishments so far.