Graduate School, I Guess
If we needed further evidence that I have no idea what I'm doing with my life, I decided to go back to graduate school this year.
It's just a two year masters program, and it's fully funded, so I don't have to pay anything, but it means I'm back in Ithaca again. Woo.
Frankly I don't know how I ended up in my current pattern of only posting year-end roundup posts on this blog that is supposed to be for all noteworthy changes to this site, but oh well.
So much has changed in my life that I barely remember what I've done this year, although I think it's relatively sparse.
First and foremost, I have now settled on mxi.ng as my redirect domain. Older links pointing to go.michaelxing.com and michaelx.ing still work as well; they all route to the same place. Turns out .ng domains are super cheap so I snagged one. Still wish I could afford mx.ing but that's $2000 I definitely don't have right now as a broke grad student.
In my last few months in Seattle, I helped a few friends from work put on a series of city-scale scavenger hunt / games loosely inspired by Jet Lag: The Game. I built the web infrastructure for it at transittrek.org, including a full game management backend that we can use to track player achievements in real time. It was kind of fun, and it was my first foray into Svelte as a framework. Definitely a lot of cool ideas there, especially with stuff like forms, though I ultimately do still find myself liking the way React handles its components as elements better.
I think the only other big change I made is that I'm working on a Kahoot knockoff since I've since learned the hard-way that Kahoot got bought out by Goldman Sachs and they want almost $30 a month to allow all question types and more than 10 players. I ain't paying that so I'm building my own instead. I tried it with my class last semester with some mild success, though I have a lot I still want to do with it. It'll probably end up in the Games menu once I'm ready, whenever that happens.
That's all I can remember off the top of my head. I will say I've noticed that the month filter has been breaking a lot recently; I have a temporary fix but I think it might require rewriting one of my SQL queries to fully fix the problem. That'll happen at some point. In the meantime, sorry if it breaks again.
Otherwise, that wraps up an extremely busy (for me) 2024 with very little to show for it on this site. Good thing I at least remembered how to get this post out in time.
See you in 2025.
Posted By: Michael Xing