wanting to go home and program in my free time like a nerd

Nerd updates. For the heck of it. Written from my semi-useless Phil 120 class.

I have started developing a small java program that I just call the expanding mind-map. The idea is that it graphically displays a bunch of pre-entered information in the form of a mind map, but they're all bunched up into one bubble initially. Upon clicking the a bubble, it expands into the next level, and so on.

In my mind, the coolest part of this is supposed to the the look and feel of the program, how smoothly the transitions happen and the cool small animations that occur whenever a bubble is clicked. Unfortunately, I have very little clue on how this fancy GUI stuff works, so all I've done is work on the boring number bits (which I believe is actually the hardest part of the program - almost a total of 3 hours working on ArrayList, String, int, and char manipulations, with a dash of trigonometry and line vectors? Whew. So far I have a program with no red underlines (the syntax is a bitch), but who knows if it's runnable yet. Many more hours to go...

What's really exciting about this to me is that it's really my first 'project' that I thought up of on my own without textbook influence. Of course, realistically it'll look like a lame program written in the 80s, but my strong visual imagination will carry me through. If I have time, I might make a concept video/animation on how the components work.

CPSC 110 is really the most amazing course I have ever taken, especially so because I self-learned Java on my own but never really learned how to properly design a program. After learning a bunch of things from DrRacket, and learning the equivalents for some DrRacket operations for Java, I now know what the point of classes are, can create data definitions, and most importantly, create methods many times more efficiently due to better planning.

When writing out a program, I find that writing a bunch of comments and pseudocode initially greatly helps with the actual coding aspect.

I will work on this very hard and pray that I don't end up with a messy pile of shitty unusable code.