CST 361s Week 6

Week 6

This week was much lighter work-wise and I really appreciated it! I was able to get a lot more done on the website for my service-learning partner. I'm really happy with the work I've been able to do and I hope that they like my improvements. I attempted to make their website more admin-friendly while I completed tasks by adding useful content to their dashboard, cleaning up the navigation links to only the ones used, and also renaming some of the links to be clearer. I put a ton of hours into working with my partner the past couple of weeks and completed 30 hours worth of work. I've sent off all of the forms to wrap up that portion of the course and will get it turned in soon.

As for the coursework, we basically just created a storyboard for our mini-documentary and did some reflection assignments (video and analysis of vide). They're pretty straightforward, but I definitely struggled with the documentary portion and will likely struggle more with creating the documentary itself! Working remotely has extreme disadvantages here, but I'll use what I have access to in order to make something that is hopefully at least presentable.

CST 361s Week 5

Week 5

The reading this week covered the difference between equity and equality in regards to social justice. It's interesting to consider the difference and what it is that we're striving for exactly when advocating for social justice. Overall, we just want everyone to have the same opportunities. The videos this week were about Black Girls Code and their mission and how gaming can change the world. Both of the videos highlighted how technology can make an impact. Black Girls Code gives young black women a potentially new opportunity through learning to code. Additionally, they are helping to add diversity to the tech industry. The second video suggests utilizing games to change the world. It's an interesting idea and I think it could take us somewhere when more creative minds get involved.

We continued learning about project management through Coursera's Project Management Basics course. The course itself is fine and relatively interesting. It may be nice to follow it up with the Agile development ideology since it's so prominent in the tech industry right now (even if it isn't ideal for projects).

I'm putting a lot more time into my contributions with my service-learning partner. After posting the basic information they wanted to their website, I'm now able to focus on the larger portions. In particular, I'm focusing on adding an event calendar. This has been a bit difficult because I don't have direct access to their server and I'm trying to manipulate the website through their drupal system. Hopefully, I'll get that figured out soon.

CST 361s Week 4

Week 4

The reading this week was interesting, as usual. I really enjoy that it is the kind of material that makes us consider the world around us. An article we read was about an African American man that brought himself to the tech industry and is continuing to bring more diversity into tech through his company, Walker & co, and Code2040. A video we were assigned this week brings to light where our electronic waste is illegally going (and it isn't pretty). That's posted at the end of this post. We also had to watch videos on project management through a course on Coursera. The material is good and fine, but I don't really think that it is appropriate for this particular class.

This week we also had check-ins with Dr. Tao and our TA, Cassandra. The check-in was fine, but I'm still feeling very behind and it definitely helped keep the pressure on me. It's a good reminder that I can't be lazy so I can get through this class!

CST 361s Week 3

Week 3

The content to read and watch was shorter this week probably because we had to do a project called the "community scan". This project requires us to go into communities that we aren't necessarily comfortable with and interview residents, take photographs, and analyze the community in general. It's pretty uncomfortable and I really hope we don't have to do another project like that again. The reading this week was nice because it encouraged us to take into consideration what other people feel and not impose how we feel about things on them (specifically speaking of the "Golden Rule"). The video we watched showed how different learning centers are using technology to teach kids to play, learn and explore. The video is at the end of this post.

I am behind on hours with my service learning partner and I am hoping to make that up this week. This was the last week of my other course that has been very reading and writing heavy. I expect to have a lot more time to dedicate to my service learning partner now. Trying to balance everything has been very difficult and I feel really bad for not being able to put that much energy into working with my partner.

CST 361s Week 2

Week 2

This week has been very busy for me. I have one week left on my history course that I'm doing at the same time as this one and I can't wait for it to be over so that I can put more effort into this service learning course. Additionally, I've had a late start with my service learning partner and am just barely getting the paperwork turned in so I haven't had the opportunity to get working hours in. I'm hoping that this next week I can swap that all around.

The course work for this week has been really interesting. We read some case studies on schools that are local to Los Angeles and how they have and haven't been working with technology. I believe that our academic system is embarrassing and I really enjoyed hearing more about how other schools are handling their lack of funds and lack of quality instructors. In LA, I also believe that there's an issue with the housing marking. Teachers don't get paid enough to live in LA and it really impacts the schools in the area. There are a lot of issues from my perspective and I'm glad to see that people are writing about them and making them known.

At the end of this course, we are supposed to create a video documentary. I'm pretty nervous about it because I'm doing it completely remote and won't necessarily have the footage. As I go along, I'm hoping to get some footage of their website and some of the major improvements that I make to it. I also think I'll start recording some audio samples in week 4(ish) that I can put into the final presentation. Getting some general videos of the beach or something would probably be good. I can use that as a backdrop. It'll probably be Santa Monica, but one can use their imagination to believe it's Monterey Bay instead.

CST 361s Week 1

Week 1

We're already in the first week and I've been extremely stressed out because I don't have a finalized service-learning partner and we're basically out of time. Additionally, I'm in the middle of a reading heavy history course through another college (which ends in ~2 weeks) that has made it very difficult to send out more emails and line up service partners. Honestly, I didn't think it would be so difficult but I'm finding that my work hours make a lot of the in-person volunteer work unavailable to me.

As far as the reading for this course has gone this week, I've really enjoyed the topics. They're relevant to what's going on in society right now and since the founding of this country. We've read a couple of items on what makes up someone's identity, social privileges, and social marginalization. It's really important to try and be empathetic with all different types/groups of people and I think we can always use reminders of this.

I'll hopefully have finalized a service-learning partner next week and will have more to say! I've a couple of leads, but we will see what happens.

CST 311 Week 8

Week 8

The material for this week is much smaller because it is due the same night that week 7 is supposed to complete. Because of this, it's also been a very rough final week with regard to assignments. The material assigned for this week covered the link layer and switches. This seems like a pretty straightforward topic after covering routers in the previous week(s). The routers send data (datagrams) based on IP addresses and the switched send data (frames) based on MAC addresses. Switches are intended to be used within a network.

I'm really glad this course is coming to an end. I've enjoyed it in the sense that it has been challenging and I feel I've learned a lot, but I'm exhausted and it's been very difficult to maintain my study discipline. There are three days until the final exam. I have spent the past seven weeks studying consistently in my free time. I'll likely relax a little and do some light review each night leading up to it. Because this is not a subject I'm already familiar with, I'm less focused on my grade for this course and have been more focused on actually understanding the material. I know it'll be useful in my career (it already has been a bit!).

CST 311 Week 7

Week 7

This week has been very difficult because it's a full week of material and we also have to do slightly more than half of week of material ("week 8") during the same week. Both weeks opened at the same time and close at the same time. I wasn't too worried about it until I got to homework #10, which was to come up with the routing table for a particular node in a network using the distance vector algorithm. I wanted to make sure I completely understood it (it took a lot of videos and reviewing the textbook). The textbook wasn't very helpful for the distance vector algorithm. It does a good job of explaining what's happening in the network, but doesn't use accurate mathematical syntax and has a some very confusing pseudocode to explain the algorithm. The videos were helpful, but weren't very precise on the steps needed to complete the second iteration of the algorithm. The topic Dijkstra's algorithm was much easier to follow (and was assigned in homework #9). This was the first half of the week that covered the rest of the Network layer.

The second half of the week began covering the link layer. There were a couple of longer videos on this topic. They covered parity errors and MAC protocols. The one on MAC protocols was long because there were a lot of protocols to cover. They're divided into separate kinds, which are channel partitioning, random access, and "taking turns" protocols.

The lab was focused on ICMP and traceroute, which I can't even remember if we have had this topic presented to us. These concepts are all completely new to me and trying to remember all of the details (and acronyms!) is very hard. It definitely worries me about the exam because the exam is worth 1/4 of our grade, I'm not a great test taker, and it's closed book. One more week of material left and I should have adequate time to relax a bit and review all of the topics covered for the final.

CST 311 Week 6

Week 6

There were a lot of videos to watch this week and a there was plenty of information covered. I struggle to remember everything after doing the lab and homework assignments, which focused on performing traceroute commands to obtain router information, implementing the longest prefix matching forwarding tables, and reassigning IP addresses using DCHP (analyzed with Wireshark).

I'm hoping the upcoming weeks are short again so that I can get through that material and get enough time to review the material from the past two weeks. There's been a lot of information and I've been doing my best to keep up with it all and take it all in, but it's very difficult.

CST 311 Week 5

Week 5

This week was pretty intense content-wise. This has been the most challenging course for me in this program, but I am happy about it. I feel like I'm walking away each week with a new understanding of how the internet is working. It definitely helps me feel more in-tune with my surroundings at work, too. This week at work we have been having some frustrating issues with the VPN client, Pulse (Juniper Networks). It drops a lot of packets when a particular packet size is sent. If I recall correctly, it's hitting the congestion window size. I didn't understand all of the specifics of it, but I could at least somewhat follow the conversation around it and I thank this course for that.

This week we covered TCP's sequence numbers and acknowledgements, reliable data transfer, connection management, and TCP's congestion control algorithm. However, I heavily focused on TCP's congestion control algorithm. There was a quiz this week that was pretty difficult for me after reading the textbook and re-watching videos on the topic, but I think I figured it out okay. I felt like some of the concepts were just taking a really long time to click. One of the professors sent out some videos as additional resources and one of those ended up helping me, but it's also possible I was just more awake when I was working on the problems.