#remarkable tablet

I got myself a Remarkable as a birthday gift 🤗

(And I can definitely say that I’m not looking back)

Good morning. ☕ Last night, I took and passed my Database Management Applications exam, which was the last exam in my degree program. Here's a pic of some of my notes (which I intended to post the other night while I was actually studying).

I have until April 30 to complete my capstone project if I'm going to finish by the end of the term. (I do qualify for a one-month extension, though. I went ahead and requested it just in case I need a few extra days.)

I drew it on my boyfriends Remarkable Tablet, its not a drawing tablet, so i apologise for the poor quality :)

it seems as though i can’t stop

The school bells are ringing! I am so looking forward to this year, especially now that things are starting to open up due to the availability of vaccines. I will be continuing in my role as an RA, but I now manage a floor comprised entirely of Computer Science and Engineering majors. The opportunity to tailor the residential curriculum specifically to topics in computing is going to be an amazing way to bring my own passions into the community. This year, I will also begin taking classes toward my master's degree in Computer Engineering, meaning that I will finish undergrad with half of my master's already out of the way!

Pictured in this post are some artifacts that I created this summer as a research assistant in a computing lab on campus. Our team is developing field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for defense applications. If you don't know, an FPGA is an integrated circuit that can be programmed to behave like any other circuit using a hardware description language like Verilog. They can be found in a host of devices you interact with every day (TVs, radios, cameras) as well as military-grade equipment like what I am working on. They are widely used due to their ease of programming, which allows for rapid and cost-effective development, as well as the ability to patch bugs without having to re-manufacture the circuitry.

In the lab, I maintain a custom toolchain that converts Verilog code into a bitstream that can be loaded onto our FPGA. At the moment, this is all happening in the context of a simulation, but by the end of the fall our little black box should come home from the factory and I can hold it in my hands! At that point, I will begin designing some circuit boards that make use of the device before it eventually makes its way onto a military drone or something of the sort.