...As the Re-Skilling Time Goes On

[This was originally a series of private messages to a friend with whom I haven't connected in a few weeks. I decided to share it more generally as it's a good synopsis of what I've been up to since the current term started at University of the People . It has been added to considerably since I identified its potential as a social media post. No circuitry photos because that part is an assignment, and sharing coursework publicly on social media is against UoPeople policy.]

I'm halfway through my cs1104 course. We're building a 4-bit computer in Logisim. So far I've got the ALU and two 4-bit registers built. The project so far has taken three weeks.

In the first week (Week 2 of the course,) I had to learn to build adder and half-adder circuits, and then string them together to make a 4-bit adder.

In the second week (Week 3 of the course,) I had to build a 4-bit subtractor. I could have found a much simpler plan inside the text, but my mind ran ahead of me and prompted me instead to modify the 4-bit adder to convert the subtrahend to its two's complement. Once that was done, the next step was to build an empty 4-function ALU, patch the adder and subtractor circuits into the first two functions, and then patch two additional simple circuits (bitwise AND and bitwise OR) into the third and fourth functions.

This week we built a 4-bit memory register using D flip-flops. I wanted to extend its functionality so in addition to the manual input, I also added a 4-bit random number generator and put a 1-bit MUX between them and the register, so the user could choose which input to use. I also added a clock to it so that the random number generator generates a new number on the downtick and the memory register updates on the uptick. I also made use of the CLEAR and PRESET pins on the flip-flops, and gave them each a control button. I thought that might all be too much to turn in, so I asked my instructor. They said it would be fine, and to keep all the extras. After building and testing the register, I made a second copy of it and replaced the manual input and output of the ALU from last week with them. It performs as well as you can expect a 4-bit circuit with a one-second clock cycle to perform!

Also, for the past few weeks, I've been taking the "AI for Good" specialization from deeplearning.ai, hosted by Coursera . My attendance there has been sporadic, but when I do go in, I get through a week's worth or at least half a week's worth of material in one sitting, so I am still ahead of schedule there. It has been interesting, and I believe it will help inform my participation in future projects, as well as my discernment regarding existing ones.

Finally, I've been assembling an interdisciplinary team of UoPeople students to work on software development projects. We've got one project going so far. It's a text-based interactive fiction game with a cyberpunk/sci-fi story. One of the team members gave the initial concept, and then she and I spent a morning filling in the top-level details. After that, I was able to write a fairly cogent beginning-to-end synopsis. It's a promising story, but it needs to be translated into game assets and actions, with many details filled in. She is now in charge of finishing the story development, but I'll be helping as I can.

As for my own role in the team, I'm the game designer and final word on the basic program logic. To that end, I've been building the code base with one other guy. With the story so far being as underdeveloped as it is, for now, we're keeping the program logic down to the barest essentials. There will probably be some visual layers tacked on later (a GUI and possibly static portraits of the game locations) so I am trying to write code that will readily facilitate adding and programming a GUI layer. I am hoping that by the time the project is ready for this treatment, there will be someone on board who likes designing GUI. At this point, I can't say that would be me.

The person who has been helping me promote and run the group since the beginning has stepped up to be the PM for this project. Within the first few hours of taking it on she had as complete of a project management plan as one could have at this stage, and a list of critical roles to be filled. I'm glad she stepped up on all that because evidently, she actually knows how to manage a project. My efforts to fill that role before she offered to take it were fairly misdirected and inefficient.

I'm still helping everywhere that I can, as I can, and trying to keep things moving forward. I have allotted a daily two-hour window to focus on this, but I usually end up taking at least one extra hour if not two. Yesterday, I spent my window preparing the forums on our project's GitHub repo to start taking over project-specific communications from the Discord server. Today, my big task is to privately contact all the lurkers in our Discord server to find out what they need to successfully join our activities. We've got 36 members in the university's social media space and 16 on the Discord server, but only 6 are active participants in the chats, and of them (which includes me,) only 4 have actively contributed to our current project. I'm hoping to improve those last two numbers this week.