End of the Year

It’s been a long and hard junior year, especially for someone like me who took 4 APs. I spent many nights working on schoolwork, doing extracurriculars, and code code coding, but far too little sleeping well. It’s finally over now though. Before the year ends though, I want to reflect on my own journey in CSA.

My Experience with CSA

Coming into CSA, I was pretty inexperienced with how everything worked. Not having taken CSP the year prior, I struggled to adjust to the more web-development orientated style of the class with VSCode, Github, Jupyter notebooks, and Spring. But, with my previous knowledge of basic Java syntax, I worked hard to understand the new tools and get the code running.

I definitely had a lot of fun throughout the entire course, exploring many cool aspects of programming. In the first trimester, I remember exploring the image conversion to ASCII characters by using math to create a more even distribution of the pixel darkness. It really showed me an example of how math could actually be utilized in programming, and not for just some simple problem. In the second trimester, I spent a lot of time exploring the complicated faucets of JWT. I had a hard time figuring out how to make it work, so I spent a lot of time researching the intricate mechanics of how it work, and while it might have caused me to fall behind in development (that was kind of a low to be honest), I still had fun trying to piece together how everything worked. I think I really got into the pace of things in the third trimester, especially when exploring how to integrate ChatGPT into our website. Even though it took a lot of research to figure out what exactly I needed, I really felt I understood how everything worked; nothing seemed to be like pure magic. It seemed almost intuitive how the entire backend functioned with the POJOs and JPA Repositories and API Controllers. And it was also great collaborating as a duo with Don for backend and as an entire team with Don, Hetvi, and Iris for frontend to work through all the issues we came across the way, like storing the secret API key properly, utilizing the correct AI model, and getting everything to display correctly on our deployed website. And we had a great final website as a result. It was pretty unique, complex, and fun.

Coming out of CSA, I really feel like I’ve learned something valuable. I think that far too many CS courses only teach basic programming syntax and barely anything that’s useful and applicable in a real-world context, but this course really taught me a lot about web-development. If someone were to ask me, I could definitely create a website for them (not necessarily from scratch, but with a template). In the future, I think I’ll continue to apply the web-development skills I’ve learned in this class alongside pursuing other aspects of computer science. I was planning to do more personal projects concerning AI, more specifically training specialized models on my own instead of relying on prebuilt APIs. And when I go to college, I’ll probably incorporate my CS skills into my major, whether it be a pure CS degree or something mixed with biology, chemistry, or physics.

The End

That’s really it for this year of CSA. I got to meet some cool people and learn about programming in a relatively chill class. It was pretty fun overall.