Friday/Shabbat – Day 178/179
January 29, 2013
Friday with no classes was a treat. However, that’s not to say I was unoccupied! First thing in the morning I had a meeting with the lovely Miss Amy Miller, my academic adviser. She helped me out a great deal in trying to figure out what I was doing and where I was going and aside from that provided me a bit of an insider view into quite how Penn worked.
The rest of the afternoon was spent meeting with Professors and working on various things, a long lunch at Hillel and then TA training and our meeting. In addition to all that I managed to squeeze in the time to make a salad for a shabbat dinner I was hosting with two friends, Michal and Ben. My only issue was a lack of invited guests. Luckily enough, lunch at Hillel provided me with the opportunity to invite a new friend, Safi Aharoni to dinner.
Friday night came and service was pretty lovely. It was good to be able to unload at the end of the week and just chill! Dinner however was absolutely wonderful. The conversation was spirited, the food excellent and this made for an overall great experience. The next day I attended the ‘sleep service’ till around midday and from there went to lunch at Aviva’s and Michal’s room. This was again a fantastic meal and made this Shabbat one of my favourites since leaving the country. I then hung around with Aviva till late afternoon when we all headed back to Hillel for a few activities before the end of Shabbat.
Following Shabbat, I raced back to my room, procrastinated for a while and, then got on to some work for the rest of the night.
Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday – Day 175/176/177
January 28, 2013
I’m finding a lot of my time now goes towards preparing for my teaching and similar duties. Much of Tuesday was spent working on solving various problems for students, fixing up the homework and holding my office hours. My hours were in fact quite enjoyable and gave me a chance to get to know a few of my fellow TAs a little better (@Dennis, @Harmony, @Pulak). As per usual I had the dreaded physics lecture. Things had ramped up so quickly with me barely noticing that by this time I was flying fast enough that my wings had started smoking. Tuesday night I had barely enough time to eat before heading off to Glee rehearsal where we examined the result of the full club survey. Turns out everyone is pretty happy the way things are.
Wednesday was another chock full day and after staying up so late to work the night before, I only just woke up in time to get ready for my midday class. My classes were not particularly challenging, it was more the workload that was getting to me. The dreaded sleep deprived demon was rising from the Penn purgatorial pits, and was quickly consuming my remaining wits. After class I had a quick chance for a break, before heading back into rehearsal (as always) and then to more office hours!
Thursday challenged me again in terms of time management but I found a little more freedom with only one class in the morning. Most of my afternoon was spent arranging various things, starting to get my room together and running about from place to place. I had a meeting with the graduate chair to discuss future options for study in the field of computer science, particularly looking at Penn as an option. It seems I may have some large decisions in my future. Thursday night I spent in ‘shop hours’, assisting in the construction of the Spring Show set by painting for a few hours and chatting to Jon Ferrari, a Glee oldman who was one of the few I had yet to interview. Finally, my school week came to an end, as Friday I was to have no classes.
PennApps – Friday/Shabbat/Sunday/Monday Day 171/172/173/174
January 25, 2013
One of my most amazing experiences at Penn thus far was marked by these four days. In case some of you were wondering why I was engaged so frequently recently, this post should help clarify it a little. As I mentioned in the previous post, PennApps is the largest student hackathon in the world, and the next two days, and the two following, marked the lead up and competition itself.
Friday I went to my usual TA training and meetings, however, additionally, I also made it to a number of ‘tech-talks’, lectures given by software engineers at various companies. I planned a little with my team and met up over the next day with many of the hackers that were visiting.
Once the hacking started the next evening, it started with a bang. The entire four building engineering quadrangle was filled with over five hundred students, with tables lining the corridors and people in every classroom. Instantly Rigel, Nikki and I were on our keyboards typing away viciously. Though we were at first a little unsure of how it would work or even what exactly we were making we pounded away nonetheless. Joining us at the table was Saajid Moyen who, unfortunately fell sick after the first ten hours. In between mad rushes for food we found the spark of an idea. And so ‘proposal.’ began to take form. Our app was designed to be used on an unguarded computer on which someone had left their facebook/twitter logged in. Our app provided an easy interface to create a fake engagement. From sending out notifications on facebook, to creating a wedding event and uploading photos, our app did it all. However, our greatest feature was the ability to what the face of the victim as they returned to their computer, through some clever use of the webcam.
Midnight came and still I coded away. Around 3AM Rigel and Nikki decided to catch some sleep, but I decide to code on. At 5AM I decided to get a little shut eye and so lay down my head on my keyboard and caught thirty minutes before bouncing back up and getting on to more code!
The next day was full of more code, and this time, visitors to our booth! People ranging from the developer evangelists (Song of TokBox and Swift of Sendgrid) to company representatives and venture capitalists. Everyone liked our idea, in particular a group of Israeli’s working for a Sear’s owned company. With renewed support we redoubled our efforts and improved our product even further, working to polish it as much as possible.
The next time and the coding was still not over, and by now we were starting to run out of time. We faced issues ranging from getting stuck with the facebook developer tools (API) to issues with our code management platform (git). It was at this point that we really relied on the support of the mentors, all the company representatives doubling as assistants who we turned to for advice in our more desperate hour of coding.
That night I caught another twenty minutes, this time in a quieter room away from the action. However, soon I was up again, working with the other two to finish off our product. At around this time a facebook rep mentioned to me that he couldn’t allow me to continue making the app publicly available as it violated facebook’s terms of service and so I forced to make it somewhat private.
We finished roughly ten minutes before the deadline for the first round of judging (for the sponsor prizes) and we even managed to style our page decently. See the finished product at http://proposal-pennapps.rhcloud.com.
The judges from the various companies and startups loved our demo but unfortunately we were informed by all of them that we were ineligible to receive their prizes due to a lack of a ‘use case’ for our product. Ie; though it was fun and awesome, it wasn’t very practical. Despite this, the attention we received boosted our egos, our reputations and opened up a number of connections to us. In particular, I was offered a potential internship at a local firm. Most exciting.
Next up was the opportunity to demo in front of a larger crowd including official judges. Our app received wide acclaim and the loudest applause from those within our group but again, we didn’t meet the usefulness criterion in order to be passed into the next round. Regardless we left feeling content.
During the awards ceremony I feel asleep numerous times and, finally when it was over, I trudged back half dead to my room and slept a long and wonderful sleep.