Exams Came And Went, Now It's Summer Time

So clearly I have not been doing a great job in terms of weekly blogging, but to be fair, I’ve had a lot on my mind, and have had a lot of things to deal with. Final assignments due all in the same week, followed by 3 weeks of exam hell. My exams were miraculously spread out somewhat decently, and I’m proud to say that I managed to pass them all, or at least well enough to pass all my courses for this semester. Yay me!

But wow, have I been keeping busy! I’ve been elected as the CSSU President, which I’m super excited about. We’ve already got a lot planned, and this also means that I have a lot of work to do over the summer. Talking to my team, I’m pretty excited with the direction we’re taking things, and am very optimistic for the upcoming year :)

Ahh, it’s finally summer time. And boy, did I miss the sun. Can I just take a moment to comment on the fact that here (Toronto, Canada that is), we seemed to have just skipped the whole “spring” part of the year, and went from Winter (it was snowing here two weeks ago), directly into Summer. I mean, it is HOT. Not that I’m complaining too much.. I just generally prefer cold weather, since I’m able to survive in colder weather.

I kicked summer of with quite a bang. I took part in the CUTC Conference here in Toronto, and also took part in their overnight hackathon. The entire experience was amazing and if I could change anything, it would probably be that I had picked my breakout sessions more wisely. The Key Note speakers were amazing! We had an amazing talk from Bob Richards, the founder of two Universities and tMoon Express, along with many other fascinating things. We also had a keynote from Stephen Wolfram, the guy who created Wolfram Alpha along with many other insane discoveries. We had talks from Facebook, android developers, gastronomy inventors, and so much more! It was all just fascinating!

This was probably the first real “hackathon” I’ve been a part of, since the Hack For Her at Google Waterloo didn’t involve a lot of coding. This experience was something else altogether! We started hacking around 6pm, and I’d found a solid group of 3 other people to work with. We had originally thought to start working on a calendar tool that allowed you to quickly check when you and a friend were free, and then tell you so that you could plan events. It wasn’t until around 10pm, 4 hours into our hackathon, that we realized Google already did this. So it was back to the drawing board for us.

Around 11:30 I think we finally decided on an idea that we thought could work. We decided to try and make a website that allows companies (or even your average, everyday contest holder) to create contests across multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc), and then easily create a single list of all entrants, and pick winners from there rather than having a contest specific to just Facebook, or just Twitter. We called our project Pick Me, and you can see it at pickme.aashni.me. It’s definitely an interesting concept, and I may continue developing it over the summer if I have nothing else to do.

But… I have a lot of other things going on! I took the plunge into App Development! I tried out a quick iOS tutorial last week, and earlier this evening I was working on something for Android. They’re both so interesting and fascinating, and I can’t wait to do more work in both of them. I need to get this android thing figured out A.S.A.P since I’m taking part in an App Developing Hackathon next week, directly followed by another (more generic) hackathon the next day. Should be an interesting couple of days!

Anyway, time for me to get some sleep! Night y’all!