Graduation

I had my graduation ceremony yesterday. Technically, I already graduated a few weeks ago, but now it's official. I'm honored to be one of the top five students who graduated with the (summa?) cum laude distinction.

In the past 3.5 years, university has been a major part of my life. It's been a very exhausting journey, but it's also been the most impactful so far. I learned a lot in the process and now I know there's so much I have yet to learn.

I finished my bachelor thesis two months ago. It's far from perfect and I wish I'd written some things differently. However, given the time and other constraints, I did my best. I'm planning to publish the repository over the next few weeks.

Last year

It's funny to reflect to where I was last year.

Writing a bachelor thesis is not required to finish the Computer Science Undergraduate program at my university. I did want to write one, but I couldn't come up with a topic.

Undergraduate studies at my university normally take 4 years to complete. Roughly around this time last year, I had no intention of graduating one semester early. Though I did have the option to do so, as I took some extra credits over the previous semesters.

Then the pandemic hit and remote learning started. There was no indication that the pandemic would be over soon (and I was correct). If I had to spend the rest of my study at home, I would rather finish it as soon as possible.

One afternoon, I did something drastic in an impulse. I decided I would finish my study and write a bachelor thesis in the seventh semester. I picked my Google Summer of Code project as the topic. I know that it feels like I've talked about it too many times already. However, I figured that it would be interesting to reflect on it again and let others know about the process in more details.

What's to come

Still, this is only a beginning.

I also said that I would take a break for a few months before I start working full-time. Yet here I am, working full-time as a Software Engineer at GudangAda starting from last Monday. An alumnus from my university offered me the job a few weeks ago. I'd like to help my family sooner rather than later, hence I took the opportunity.

It feels weird to see part of your routine getting replaced by something else. I used to ride my bike to the campus every morning, hoping not to miss the 8 AM classes. Now it's mostly just me sitting in front of my laptop, in my own room.

Anyway, I figured this would be a good time to start writing these logs. I took the inspiration from Simon Willison's and Carlton Gibson's Weeknotes posts. I chose to use a somewhat more general term "logs" for these posts just so that I can be more flexible. The principle is the same, though: I just want to publish some writings on a regular basis without trying too much. Let's see if this will work out.