A Minor Announcement

Happy Wednesday everyone! I’m happy to announce that I’ve officially began working on my second major project. After writing my last blog post on Monday, I spent a few hours puzzling over what I wanted to focus on now that my website’s reached a more polished state. At first I had a hard time settling on anything. Part of me wanted to make another type of web-based app with extensive API integration while another part of me was more inclined to make a cross-platform, console-based app. There are so many interesting facets to software engineering that choosing a specific topic or tech stack can be difficult without outside guidance or constraint. Also, given the size constraints placed on me as a lone developer, I knew I needed to choose something manageable that would still leave me time to complete one more project before the beginning of the semester. So, after much deliberation, I ended up deciding to go with a cross-platform puzzle app. As I envision it now, this app will have ten different functionalities that will be able to solve common problems that students of computer science encounter throughout their studies. At the moment, this is what I have in mind: 1. A Fibonacci Iterator 2. Prime Number Factorization 3. A Prime Number Generator 4. A Palindrome Analyzer 5. A Payment Change Calculator (fewest number of coins) 6. A Binary/Decimal Number Converter 7. Reversing a User-Provided String 8. Calculating the Distance Between Two Geographic Coordinates 9. A Sudoku Puzzle Solver 10. Converting Infix Expressions to Pre and Postfix Notation What’s more, I thought this would be a good opportunity to dip my toes back into the world of C++. As I’ve already solved many of these problems in Python, I thought compiling all of these functions into one program would be an appropriate challenge. C++ is an entirely different beast than Python. Although some of it has remained familiar to me, it’s definitely been an adjustment returning to a typed programming language. Ultimately, I’d really like to use a toolkit like Qt to design a graphical user interface (GUI) for my app. Not only would this add another layer of challenge to the project, but it would also allow me to share it with my friends and family who would be lost trying to run something like this in the terminal. More specifically, I’m designing this with my Grandpa in mind. He’s an avid Sudoku puzzler, and I think he’d like to have a program like this to check his answers (or covertly get some assistance!) with his daily puzzle. Given my lack of experience with Qt and GUI design in general though, I might be naive to think I can craft an interface for this app in a reasonable timeframe (~2 weeks). But I like to be optimistic, and if I’m not able to take this project out of the command line for the time being, it’ll be alright too. Assuming this project doesn’t come with any significant roadblocks (which is a very distinct possibility!), I’d definitely like to make some simple programs involving APIs afterwards. Maybe some type of Twitter bot or a weather app that I could integrate into my website. Whatever it is, I’ll be sure to let you know about it! In the meantime, keep an eye on my GitHub to watch the development of my puzzle app. I’m hoping to have the core of the program (meaning all ten functions working properly in the command line) by the end of the week. Hope for good news on Friday! -Joe