tldr: Try it now. Of course, I am a big fan of the metric system, who isn’t? It is very satisfying to convert units easily into other units and see the relationships between units of very different realms, e.g. quantities from mechanics and electricity. With the SI system of units, all specially named derived units (like Volt, Pascal, Newton) are linear combinations of the seven base units without any additional factors.

When studying, many people recommend to go abroad for a term or more. The EU’s Erasmus initiative makes this very easy, especially if the home university has agreed to partnerships with other universities. This made it possible for me to travel to Blekinge Tekniska Högskola for a term in 2021/22. Was it worth it? What are the goals of a semester abroad? Learning a language and getting to know the culture?

During the past year, the last year of my bachelor studies, I had the pleasure to work on a bachelor project. This project aimed to create a tool to create “scrollytellings”, interactive web pages that can be controlled by scrolling. Scrollytellings can combine text, images, videos and any other media found on the web, including games or control elements. Working in a team of 5 and with a industry partner, we created a software named qinoq that allows non-developers to create these scrollytellings.

During the past semester I have programmed in a few languages: Python during Advent of Code ( my first participation at that event ), Ruby for a university project and Rust for another little project. But I have mostly used Javascript and have come to appreciate it. I had not used Javascript before for more than a few lines and now used it almost every day. Javascript has a bad reputation for a few reasons:

I spent this special summer building an operating system. It starts with me taking the Operating Systems II seminar. Here we were given several projects to work on and we decided in a group of 5 people to build a network stack (TCP/IP) for LEGO Mindstorms robots. We were given a basis: A bootloader, a scheduler and timer interrupts for it. Based on this we built inter-process communication and implemented syscalls, while another part of the group tackled network communication.