This week I received my marks for my final project and final exam in my programming class [yayyy!] and I got a chance to look at some projects that I could use my raspberry pi for.

Project

I decided to try using one of my raspberry pi’s as a Pi-hole. There are quite . a . few . resources . on . how . to . do . this, which I really appreciate, because if something doesn’t make sense to you, you can always look at other articles or resources and find something that probably makes a lot more sense to you. It’s something that I’m looking to get set up this week, and then I can evaluate how it works and if it’s something that I think we should keep, or if I would rather use my pi for another project.

Programming

Oh, my final project! [I talked about this in Weekly Learning Update (04)] I actually got a pretty good mark on the version that I submitted [like, close to 100%] but I had worked on it after submitting to try to make use of the optional Provinces table in the database. I had the app working correctly, but I decided to do further testing and found it was throwing an exception when I tried to create a new record. I had a look at the source code, and decided it was time to hoist the white flag: I emailed my lecturer. Classes are over, and the marks are in, so he’s not technically my lecturer anymore, but I got in touch, said that I wanted to understand how to make this work, and that I was struggling with it. I sent over my project, and you know what? He took the time to explain to me where it was going wrong, and what I could do to make it even better.

I learned two things from this: often, I ask for help casually; asking a question while the lecturer is walking around the room, and because of this I need to make changes to how I’m dealing with remote learning for the next term. And I often think that my questions aren’t important enough to actually send them an email, and disrupt their time [because we’re not actually in class anymore, and I’m not paying them with my tuition!] so I need to be better at this as well. All of the lecturers that I’ve had have been incredibly open and kind about reaching out for help, but it can be hard to get used to. This is the reality that we’re currently in though, and I’ll need to work at communicating better when I have questions, instead of slipping into the google-trap; in it’s place maybe reaching out after a set amount of time spent on an issue.

Next

I’ll be setting up my Pi-hole project, and polishing my final assignment to get to a place where I’m really pleased with it.