Ryan's Repository of Random Reflections

There are a few non-profit organizations that work to improve high school curriculum's by helping incorporate Computer Science. One such organization is Partner4CS.  Partner4CS is a non-profit organization centered in Delaware trying to bring a high quality computer science classes to middle schools and high schools. This program hopes to broaden participation in computing, increase awareness of computer science and its impact on the world around us, and increase enthusiasm for computer science. During the fall of my sophomore year, I participated in a 1 credit seminar in which I learned about teaching CS to students in a fun and exciting way while still getting core principles across. I collaborated with professors and other undergraduates to help facilitate an after school program at the Newark Charter School called Scratch Club. For those that are not familiar with Scratch, it is a powerful and easy to use programming language that has many abstractions already built in. It i

Albert Einstein once said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” This fundamental idea should be at the heart of every high school curriculum. Unfortunately, schools are more concerned with test performance than student growth. Due to this intense focus on test preparation, many high schools overlook computer science and omit it from the curriculum. A high school computer science implementation will not only give students the technical skills they need to enter the job market today, but it will also provide students a new level of academic rigor that will help prepare them for challenging college courses. Computer science is an important subject because it requires logical reasoning and creativity, which are skills that all successful college students need to have. Computer scientists have the rare ability to turn an idea into reality. Designing a computer program is a multistep process that requires the programmer to express solutions to s

A few weeks ago I wrote a minesweeper bot. It was a great exercise and the complexity of the algorithm was not unlike the Project Euler problems that I solve. For those that are interested, I am posting a video demonstration, as well as the implementation details at the bottom of this post.  I had two main motivations for coding this bot: To learn about JNA To create a computer program that can play minesweeper better than myself JNA is a java API that is useful for interacting with the Windows OS. I used it to gain information about the minesweeper board. I wanted to learn it so I can write more automated programs that can interact natively with applications on my computer. This isn't the first time that I've devised a program that can play a game better than myself, but it's the first single player game that I've solved. I've also done work with Nim, Farkle, and BlackJack.  I find it fascinating that a computer program can be more intelligent than the pr

This summer I worked at JP Morgan Chase & Co. as an summer intern. I was recruited by JPMC as a freshman after attending their Code For Good Challenge. For those that are interested in getting an internship, attending a hackathon is a great way to get on a companies' radar. I worked as a technical analyst on a database administration team. I was tasked with creating a web application that helped manage database space. While I can't go into details due to JPMC's code of conduct policy, I will say that it was an excellent experience. I went in knowing about most of the tools that I needed (java, web development, tomcat, sql, etc.) so I was definitely well prepared. From a technical point of view, learning about JPA and Hibernate was the best thing I got out of this internship. JPA is an industry standard that allows for easy conversion between SQL rows and java objects. Hibernate provides the implementation of the ORM (Object Relational Mapping). It's very elegant a