Journal 30

 August 13 - August 15

Hi journal. This is it- week 8. I cannot believe how time as flown by, I know I say that every week, but wow. To start, I have now, without a doubt, learned to double and triple check how to share an application in a Zoom recording, because I just recorded my desktop for the final exam like a complete idiot. Anyways, I really don't know what I can do about that now, so I'll just hope it ends up being even a little bit ok, because I studied very hard for this exam. Oh well, you live and you learn, I guess. Some of my biggest takeaways from CST334 are the following:
* C programming is not for the weak, I felt myself going bald from having to program within my terminal, and I will never take IntelliJ and other pretty applications for granted again.
* Procrastination is no longer tolerable in this program. When they said dedicate 20+ hours a week, they actually meant it.
* Perhaps mastering conversion from hex to decimal to binary all those years ago was worth it.
* Some of my favorite topics covered were:
- Chapter 13 covering how an OS fabricates an abstraction of memory for each process (address space) in order to make it seem as though individual programs have their own individual, private memory. Such virtual memory allows for isolation of memory between processes and makes it so that one process does not affect another's memory and vice-versa. This was interesting to learn about because I had always wondered about how it was done, and this chapter provided good insight. 
- Somewhat related to the aforementioned topic, I actually really enjoyed working on my group project in this course. Of course, I always enjoy working with my teammates, but I actually truly found the topic we selected to be fascinating, and a bit scary. We chose to do our project on "The Most Dangerous Code in the Browser" which spoke about privacy concerns when utilizing browser extensions. Through such reading and researching, we found that all four of us were guilty of not only allowing permissions without much thought, but using quite a few extensions that were on the list of "unsafe" ones. This project opened our eyes to something that we, as programmers, should honestly have already known, and such a revelation was so deeply interesting.
Overall, this class absolutely kicked my butt and showed me the true meaning of dedicating reading, studying, note-taking, and work time. With that being said, I did learn A LOT of information, maybe even too much at times, over the course of these 8 weeks. Hopefully, I can use it in the future in the program or in a job.