Can't Wait to Have More Free Time

2021-04-11

The end of winter semester is finally in sight. One more week, a few projects, then exams and I'll be in the clear.

It's been a rough past month or so, and to avoid taking any responsibility for that myself I'm putting the full blame on having to go through a full year of remote learning.

Seriously though, I think remote classes have taken their toll on everyone. Something like half the people I talk to regularly are struggling to keep up. Some professors have done an awesome job at making classes accessible and easy to follow despite everything, while it seems like others have put in the bare minimum amount of effort to bring their classes online.

There's something about physically being in class that you can't quite replicate even through live online lectures. I can't wait to get back to it. Even the thought of just walking around campus and running into people has me excited.

On the bright side, I'm just a few weeks away from having a lot more free time on my hands. I was thinking about taking a class or two over the summer but I'm leaning towards just taking a break and working full-time, especially if the classes I want to take are still going to be online. But who knows, I've still got a little bit of time to change my mind.

More free time means I'm finally going to be able to put the energy I want into some of my hobbies. For a while now I've had an itch to find some FOSS projects to contribute to in some way, I've just been too busy to be able to think about it.

I might even get around to starting one of my own. One of my classes this semester has had several projects where I've had to write an HTTP proxy while making use of multiple threads or I/O multiplexing. It might be fun to see how well what I learned carries over to writing a gemini server or client.

More seriously I might dip my toes into real Android development. I've already got some experience with it from two previous classes so I'm pretty confident I could have something that people would actually want to use after a few months of work. I've had a somewhat unique idea for a reminder app sitting in the back of my mind since last year that I would love to turn into a real thing. I also would love to experiment with making my own Android gemini client since there's not many options on Android currently and each has its own issues.

Thoughts like these are basically what's got me holding on these past few weeks. I love programming and computers but it gets exhausting mostly working on projects that you're almost entirely uninvested in. It'll be so nice to have the freedom to work on what I want to work on for a change.

- moddedBear

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