Spring term is now well under way, I should be getting exam results any day now and I am a little bit tense for it. Work wise, the bulk of this term has been learning VHDL in the Further Digital Electronics module. VHDL is a hardware description language used for designing digital circuits. I’m finding it nice to be moving away from traditional digital circuit design, with component schematics, to something a lot faster and more professional. Though I feel it will take quite a bit of practice to get used to, as you always have to consider what components will be generated. This means you can’t just run away coding like you normally would in a high level language like C. Along with further digital I am also taking the Computer Architecture module which focuses more on processor design and instruction sets, but as this module also involves a lot of VHDL the two modules complement each other well.
In other news I took part in the York game jam, part of the Global Game Jam 2016 which had around 40,000 people participating worldwide. We had a weekend to produce a game from start to finish. I had an amazing time and met a lot of really nice and incredibly talented people. Thankfully you didn’t need to have any prior experience in game development and the people there were always really welcoming and helpful. We weren’t able to produce the next gaming masterpiece but it was a lot of fun and gave me a little taste of game development, something I might be interested in trying out further in the future.
Lately I have also been looking at the option choices for my third and fourth year. There is a lot of flexibility in these years for how you want to tailor your degree; I’m particularly interested in taking the Neural Networks module, along with Analogue and Digital Filters which is a prerequisite for the Signal Processing module in fourth year.
This term I have also finally gotten round to getting a gym membership at the university gym, something I feel I should have done a long time ago. I have been going twice a week with my housemate, who is the captain of the York Quidditch team and according to him “Quidditch is not as nerdy as you think” and he would kick me for not recommending you go to try outs and give it a go.
Finally, I feel the need to include this photo of me being greeted by this friendly fellow when I was walking home, who felt more than comfortable using me as a lookout perch!
Leave a Reply