Digital Design Journal by Jawad Rahman

     The second guest speaker of CS Week was Mr. Maseda from Care Point Health. Three questions I prepared for him were "What is a challenge you face in your job?", "What processes do you use to solve them?", and "How often do you need to network with others?" Mr. Maseda is a cyber security and cyber crime investigator and professional. Mr. Maseda informed us about how there were different forms of malware; Trojans, phishing, and viruses are some examples he gave. These forms of attacks are external and while they can cause a lot of damage with knowledge of the nature of these attacks they're easy to avoid. More potentially destructive attacks happen internally. Information such as finances of a company or a network access code can be retrieved and put to malicious use easier if the attack occurs inside of an organization than outside. Preventing attacks on the inside is part of Mr. Maseda's job. While not to in depth with the technical side of...

     The first guest speaker of CS Week was someone who works for Wikipedia, Mr. Otto. Three questions I prepared for him were "What do you like about your job?", "Who helped you find it?", and "Do you fear AI will take your job?" Mr. Otto talked about his experience finding a job he liked. He did not study in the field of CS in college. Mr. Otto studied and worked an entirely different field but discovered the current field he was working wasn't very enjoyable to him. He found out what he really liked was in the field of CS and even though he didn't go to college for it he was still able to gain the skills in the job he desired and got his job at Wikipedia. He told us to explore our options early in life an network with people that could help us in the future. Based on his experience he told us it's okay to not know what you're passionate about and it takes experimenting to figure out what suits your taste. What you're studying...

     In the 3rd WBL Workshop this year we learned about our rights as workers. There are certain laws  (OSHA Laws) for working under 18. To be able to work under 18 you must have the proper working papers. A blue card (for 14 - 15 year olds) or green card (for 16 - 17 year olds) are the required documentation needed to be eligible to work. The law permits a maximum 8 hour work day (lower if on a school day), a maximum of 6 days a week, and a maximum of 48 hours per week. The range of hours permitted to work is from 6AM to midnight. If a worker is injured because of something at their job their are eligible to receive worker's compensation. Finally, a memorandum of agreement must be issued highlighting specific work experience agreements that will be used as operating procedure. The student, parent, coordinator, and employer must agree to the terms.      There are certain occupation young workers can't hold. These are dangerous occupations such as min...

     The G4C Game Jam introduced me to game design and elements of what make up a video game. The theme of the Game Jam was automated communities, or looking at how technology could change suburban life for better or worse in the years to come. The presenter taught us that there are certain key elements that make a game a game; a game engine, rules/mechanics, UI, and objectives. A game engine is simply the environment the game is played. A hands game (i.e. rock, paper, scissors) can be played anywhere in the real world with the correct amount of human players while a video game must be played somewhere with the correct technology (console, computer, etc. needed to play the game). The rules and mechanics set up what the player can do in the game. In rock, paper, scissors the player can gesture their hand in the form of a rock, paper, or scissor. The rule is rock beats scissors, paper beats rock, and scissors beat paper. The two players must gesture at the same time to ke...

     In Lab 14 we were introduced to inserting JavaScript into our website. The premise of this lab was creating a button that changed a line of text when clicked. The first thing we needed to do after setting up the HTML file was code a button in HTML. A button is created in HTML by using the <button></button> tags. The button tag has 2 attributes, type and onclick. The type was set to button since it needed to function as such. The onclick attribute was set to the name of the function we would create later on in JS. By setting the attribute this way when the button is clicked it will call on the JS function of the same name to execute. In between the button tags we put text we wanted to display inside the button. Next came creating the line of text we wanted to change when the button was pressed. The line of text before the button was pressed was created by using <p> tags with the text going between the tags. This time, however, the <p> tags n...

     Lab 13 involved turning our DD portfolio online into a genuine looking website. This website needed to have a homepage, page that has links to all labs, page that has links to all projects, and a unifying stylesheet all pages are linked to. The reason for having a unifying stylesheet is that websites must have a consistent look so the user knows they are in the same site. If web pages of the same site have wildly different styles the user is confused about whether they're in the same site or not. The <link> tag was a crucial part of this lab, letting me link all pages in the site to the main stylesheet.      I started out by creating the home page, which I named index.html and saved in the DD folder outside of any other folder inside the DD folder. I named and saved it this way as when the browser opens up my website it automatically loads the index or home page without having to click a link to do so. The home page needed to have navigation bar...

     Lab 12 was a rapid research lab about a file format. The first thing we did was choose from a list of file formats to research about. In this lab I choose to research ZIP files. Once we choose our format we needed to research an overview of what it was, a history of its development, a method of compression it uses, and the pros/cons of the format. The research was done online with important facts and sources being written on a handout. Once we gathered all our facts we drafted 4 paragraphs, each paragraph focusing on a category we researched.      Once our 4 paragraphs were drafted we needed to make a web page about our file format, with the contents being the paragraphs we drafted. This was the simple part of the lab as once we set up the HTML page all we needed to do was create headings for each category using the heading tags and copy and paste our paragraphs in between <p></p> tags, making sure the paragraph is underneath the c...

     A computer processor, or CPU, is a small but very significant chip inside a computer. It is responsible for executing instructions of computer programs and dealing with inputs and outputs. CPUs have always gotten smaller in size yet doubled in speed every 2 years by increasing the amount of transistors in the build (Moore's law). The future of the CPU may not be in getting smaller, however, with Intel's latest announcement of their new product. The Foveros chip will be the first 3D stackable chip to be implemented in the industry. The design philosophy of the chip is dividing key elements of a CPU into sections known as 'chiplets' and making processing components stackable and a premade chip die/mold. The benefits of this philosophy increase power and efficiency of a CPU but also help make it viable to make chips at a 10nm scale, something Intel has faced many bumps in the road doing. The different sections of the processor are made in a process called 2D stacking;...

     Cars have always been evolving since their popularization in the early 1900s. We've gone through many eras of car designs. From the very compact and simple design of the 20s to the boxy look of the 70s to today's aerodynamic and fuel efficient designs one thing has always remained the same, a human driver behind the wheel. In recent times, however, companies have been developing technology to eliminate that need. This is nothing new but to expect driverless technology to hit the markets very soon, as many car companies have been telling us, might now be questionable. Waymo, a company that has been working on driverless technology since 2009, recently rolled out its Waymo One, a self driving taxi. Many, including Waymo themselves, expected the Waymo One to be fully driverless and open to the public by this year but seems to have failed in that regard. Waymo's recent roll out involves the public very little. Not many people are using the new service; Waymo refuses to r...

     A function is a group of instructions or commands that serve to reduce the complexity of writing. Essentially, one outcome that needs many lines of code to achieve can be achieved with one line of code, the call to the function once it is defined. While reducing a lot of complexity even more complexity can be reduced through use of parameters. A parameter is additional information passed to a function to customize it. If a coder wrote a program to draw a triangle to draw a smaller triangle the coder would need to copy the entire function and change only the parts that controlled size within the function to make a smaller triangle. Instead of having multiple functions for different sizes, however, adding a parameter to specify size allows the coder to use 1 function to make many sizes of triangles. What the parameter did was make the function less specific and more customizable. It makes programs manageable since a coder doesn't need to worry about defining many funct...

     Before the age of the Internet when people needed to buy something they would go out to a store that sold the item they were looking for. When the Internet came along some websites, such as eBay and Amazon, started selling goods online and gained popularity. A term has been coined to describe the transaction of goods online, e-commerce. E-commerce is now a normal part of people's lives and the rise of it is a major reason why traditional stores, refered to as brick-and-mortar stores, are on the decline. Many factors favor e-commerce over brick and mortar; websites are more convenient to access than physical store, websites cost less since there is less/no staff to pay, etc. Amazon, however, is tinkering with the idea of a brick and mortar store being staffed with humans, shifting to a cashierless store design. An example of how AmazonGo looks      Amazon, one of the biggest e-commerce sites, is planning to open around 3000 AmazonGo stores in the c...