Category: Uncategorized

Where Have You Been?

DiamondLeave a comment

Greetings all.

It’s been a while and I apologize.

Many things have gotten in the way since my last entry. From health issues to midterms, and breaks to finals. Life has gotten in the way. I was hoping I would have been able to keep the blog entry’s up throughout this but alas I did not. I was also hoping to continue posting as soon as the new year started, but that too I had difficulty with.

So starting now, I would like to try and post a bit more frequently. Not every week like I’d hoped in the beginning, but at least twice a month.

I will continue this update by telling you some of the great things I have done in the meantime!

October 2018:

Every year my school puts on Science Day, I am the president of the ACM-W chapter at my university and it is our duty to put on demos for the College of Computing Sciences. I, along with a few others, were able to put on an outstanding demo with Matlab.

They also asked me to write a blog post for their website, but I will not be linking it due to privacy reasons.

December 2018:

Unfortunately, I will not be attending WiCys 2019 this year but I was grateful for the opportunity to go last year.

February 2019:

I decided that by August I want to have my Security+ certification. My dream is to one day have a career with CyberSecurity so I am taking one of many steps to achieve this.

March 2019:

I have applied for the Grace Hopper Conference Scholarship and hope to receive an invitation.

I have also gotten my club of ladies to participate in Women’s History Month! We have created flyers to post around our school building spreading facts about women in tech.

Thank you for reading my latest post. I hope to be able to deliver more.

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Android Development.1

DiamondLeave a comment

As an Informatics major, I have only taken a couple of programming and development classes. After attending a Cyber Security Conference in March of this year and hearing numerous stories from women in various STEM fields, I was determined to begin learning some things on my own. I wanted to being with Android Development. After doing some research I found a website that gave me some tutorials and beginner knowledge on the concept. I learned the basics very quickly due to my other courses I took as a Computer Science major, which helped thoroughly. These were all about code and also had activities to help the user perform actions on their own. After learning the basics, I decided to download the Android Developer program, Android Studio, to try my hand at it.

My first impression of the program was that it looked similar to other code editors. The only differences with these include: a display of how the app design will look on the right-hand side. It would also change simultaneously as you changed your code. I felt it looked cool and I was very excited to begin the beginner app designs that the website offered. But I was immediately hit with a couple issues on my own.

So in order to test you app there are two ways. One you can use an Android device OR run an Android Emulator. My CPU is not strong enough to handle the Android Development Emulator. The funny thing is, before I started this journey I did consider getting a new CPU. But now that I am enrolled in school, and not employed, this will have to take the back burner. My second issue is that I don’t own or have an Android Smartphone handy in order to do the testing manually. Although I may look into purchasing a cheap Android Tablet off of Amazon, I can’t really do anything else. These are just a couple issues but my biggest one is TIME. Now that I am back in school I have little to no time to dedicate towards this. My plate is kind of heavy this semester and I don’t know if I’ll have to wait for holiday breaks to dedicate more time towards this endeavor.

This was just a tiny update on how I’ve been doing with this task. I am not sure when I will be able to give you guys an update on this journey but hopefully I will get through these problems smoothly.

Below I would like you all to comment your experience with Android Development and any tips/tricks I may need to know. Thank you all for reading!

The Decision of Changing My Major

DiamondLeave a comment

The year is 2009 and I am entering my 7th grade school year (12 years old). For the first time I am taking a computer class that I was somewhat interested in. After playing games on my home PC, since I was about 8, I decided that I wanted to learn more about computers and how they function. My teacher was hilarious and seemed just like a kid although he was much older than us middle schoolers. I will never forget that year because it introduced me to my admiration for technology. In this class I learned about hardware and how computers are built, along with learning how to perform basic primal functions. When we came back from Christmas break he then introduced us to web design using Dreamweaver. Our task that semester was to redesign the school’s website. I was given the Homepage. I was so anxious that I would do horribly but my teacher saw substantial promise in what I had to offer. Through lots of trial and error, and doing some things at home, I created a page I was proud of. I wish I had thought of taking pictures of what my final edit was so I could show you all. But that would just be embarrassing.

Fast forward to the year 2015. I am now a senior in high school and have not taken many computer classes, but still liked to learn about computers on my own. I was very active in sports and just didn’t have the time to stick with my passion. I still played games and ogled at new technology emerging, wanting to know all about it. But ever since 2009 I knew I wanted my career to deal with computers. I wanted to be a Computer Scientist. So it was an easy guess for me to choose Computer Science as my major when entering university. I was so naive to the major and didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I didn’t really have any friends or family that liked computers as much as I did or even knew about programming. I entered college in the Fall of 2015 with a blank slate and not knowing as much as I needed to.

My first semester was extraordinary! I wasn’t taking any computer science courses but just the basic first year courses, along with an electrical engineering class that was very enjoyable and informative.

My second semester I took my first programming class in Python. It was the first language I was introduced to and I thought “Wow this is pretty easy”. Well it was a beginning computer science class so I was naive to what the other languages even were. That next fall, the beginning of my sophomore year, I began taking a Java programming class. It was very difficult and demanding for me. I hadn’t programmed much and the class was very fast paced. Not knowing anyone in the class I would try my best to reach out to the students in my class. There were only two other girls in the class and the rest of the room filled with guys. The guys were much more fluent in programming languages so I tried to reach out to a few of them after class. I had no luck with this attempt. Most of their responses were either a polite “It took me forever to learn too” or a harsh “You have to figure it out on your own like I did”. But no one ever offered to help when I’d ask. Which I guess is true but they had all been programming for at least two or three years prior to me so I thought they’d be more welcoming. I in no way blame them for my unsuccessfulness in the course (which I ultimately failed) and I thank them for even responding to me. But after these failed attempts I went to the TA of the class. Which I hate to say was even worse. When I went in for questions he said, “How don’t you know this already”, or literally come next to me and start typing it himself. And this was my first and only time there.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I go to my professor. Now don’t get me wrong he was a very pleasant man, but in class if you asked a simple question about how you didn’t get something he would get slightly annoyed. I’m a very shy person so after those little incidents I didn’t want to ask as many questions as I had. This led me to staying up late trying to figure out programming assignments and stressing for tests. And I also began to realize that I didn’t want to do this for the rest of my life. I didn’t like programming.

Rewind to Spring 2015, I went to the college I am currently attending for a preview day. It was just tours and people talking about different majors. When I went to the College of Sciences table I saw that not only Computer Science was offered but also another major I wasn’t aware of, Informatics. Informatics is dealing with Information systems and sciences, retrieval of data, network infrastructures, databases, and lots of aspects in Information technology. I was very interested when I head of it and my mom always says my face “lit up” when I would talk about it. But Informatics was new to me and I still had my mind focused on Computer Science.

Fast forward to Fall of 2016 and it’s my scheduling time. I was stressed between staying in Computer Science and changing my major to Informatics. It was a challenging choice, but after talking to some Informatics students I knew it was the major for me. I changed it that semester and began taking Informatics courses in Spring 2017. The concentration I chose was Health. I loved the medical aspects and deals with Healthcare, feeling that I could aid with these problems. IT WAS BY FAR THE BEST DECISION I HAVE EVER MADE. Every class I attended I was hungry to learn more, even with all the projects and work I am still in love with it.

It is now Fall 2018 and I am a senior. It’s bittersweet but I will be graduating in the Fall of 2019. I am beyond excited to see what the future holds for me and ecstatic to learn more.
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Below I would love to hear your stories about changing majors and how they’ve affected your view on school and your future!

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Artificial Intelligence and Your Future

DiamondLeave a comment

As a technology enthusiast, I know that the future will be drastically different from where we stand today. From technology to even daily routines, nothing will be the exact same. While I am excited about these changes I still am a little reserved on how Artificial Intelligence will play a role. When I entered college I chose Computer Science as my major and Cognitive Science as my concentration. I was extremely interested in anything that had to deal with artificial intelligence as well as the mental organization of the human brain. Semesters passed, and while I changed my major I did still dabble in readings about AI and its increasing role in society. While skimming along articles about AI the past couple of days they progressively peaked my interest. I found myself agreeing with most of the authors opinions.

Today I will discussing the overall question or opinion on the future of AI. Hopefully in the future I will be able to do more detailed discussions based on specific issues in AI. My initial thought on this technology is that is it remarkably powerful. And while powerful also brings along amazement and fascination, it equally strings along uncanny negatives. I would love for the future to have tons of trendy AI that we have all dreamed of without us questioning whether or not something horrible will go wrong. But, as we can all imagine, there will come a time that AI will be so powerful that we won’t even have to get out of bed on our own. This is actually my main point. The farther we get with AI the less significant being a human being will matter.

Along with any AI creation that we develop there are new potential security threats will appear. We’ll need to first prove to the public that safety is our number one concern because if that requirement is not met it will only push back developers and creators plans. I know that these risks will only be involved with certain AI, but do you see what I mean? Everything has risks. And while most of the people I’ve spoken to on my campus believe otherwise and want to be blind to that fact, it will only make AI’s existence unfavorable. When creating this new technology creators need to put humans first instead of blurring the line between humans and AI.

Don’t get me wrong I love the little AI that we have now in banking, transportation, and social networking. But I am questioning whether or not we will be able to co-exist instead of technology completely taking over our daily routine. Now this is not a complete flip on how I felt when I first entered college. I still had these reserves but also wanted to explore just how it was created. I am ecstatic to see what the future holds and how technology’s role develops, and maybe I am completely wrong and everything will be perfect. I just hope that when new AI of the world is introduced it is open to criticism.

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Below I would love to hear your opinions and any criticism you may have. This my first time ever posting something like this and would love to hear how other people feel! Hopefully, we can have a discussion in the comments 🙂

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Here Goes Nothing

Aside DiamondLeave a comment

Hello all! My name is Diamond and I am a university student with a wide interest in technology, gaming, and related gadgets. If you would like to follow my journey in code development and development as a technical enthusiast please look no further! I will say that there will be lots of trial and error; […]