Project Cortana: Day 56

*What I liked*

Here is the rant where I described the project: https://devrant.io/rants/962190

Time for a review. The biggest advantage I have found was the productivity. Let me explain:

1. Cortana: It's useful as fuck if anyone is willing to use it all the time. It really helps to get reminders and notifications everywhere (PC, Laptop and Mobile).

2. Microsoft Launcher: An underrated gem due to the hate towards M$. Thanks to it's transparent theme, it looks absolutely gorgeous. The most useful part is the "Feed" where you get all your emails, recently edited documents, recently used apps or contacts all together. I was quite surprised to see the level of customization if offered considering it's M$.

3. M$ Office: I probably don't need to talk much about it, it's the most productive tool you can get. Outlook is fucking brilliant on mobile. Other office apps, while they are great on mobile, are probably more useful in tablets. And the "Focused Inbox" is the best thing happened to outlook.

4. M$ To-Do: Holy fuck, this is sick. I know that there is many alternative with more features. But this app is the perfect example of a todo app. Simple, has the exact right features and has a really smooth, beautiful UI. This really helped me to be productive.

5. OneDrive: Didn't find much difference compared to Google Drive.

6. People: Something that I discovered later and found it really useful. You can pin contacts in the taskbar and see emails, calender items associated with that contact in one click. Found it really useful considering I was chatting with my Supervisor and lectures quite frequently.

7. Windows Mail App: While I really like it, I have mixed feeling about it. I would really love to have HTML signature. Not sure why M$ is not implementing it. But the "Share" in the Context Menu is really useful while sending attachements.

Finally, the "Fluid Design" so far is beautiful. Loving the effects.

I will write what I didn't like in the next rant.

Ok apparently I forgot rants can only be edited within the first 5 minutes, I thought it was 30, and you can't rant 2 times in 2 hours so I'll have to wait before posting this.

So, I'm doing a Genetic Algorithms class, something I liked since I was 15 yo and didn't know shit about coding, but I loved the carykh videos about it. (here is part 1: https://youtu.be/GOFws_hhZs8 )

The yearly class consisted of 3 little projects to be able to do the final exam and an investigation project to pass the subject without a final exam.

We had to make teams, and I got together with 5 more people.

I have a lot to say about these 5 people, but the only thing I'll say is that I was the most experienced programmer among the 6 of us, if they had any experience at all. Mind this is a third cycle class.

We were allowed to use any technology, as long as we wrote the important algorithms by hand, of course.

The development of the first project was such a mess, that one of the members left the subject.

While developing the second one, we were given the topic for the investigation project; fractals.

It took a lot for us to find an application of fractals where we could use genetic algorithms. Once we found it, fractal antennas, we had to learn about antennas, so we interviewed professionals, and such. We ended up learning to evaluate antennas.
We also found a site that used some parameters to generate fractals, we had the parameterization.
We just had to code it. It was July and we just had to code it by October.

We were 5 people, and "we" were so busy writing the little projects, we fucking couldn't finish the investigation project.
We just had to write the proper algorithms and GUI specifics, without even having to write boilerplate (we used the first project as a template), and they still took so much that we didn't have time for the important project.

That sucked, because I had been coding and investigating in many weekends, I spent countless hours on them, I had to pause development on other projects for these ones; and after all that we have to do the (very shitty) final exam.

Since May, the average people together "working" on the different projects was 2.6. And 100% of the time, I was one of them.
We tried to speed up things in the last months but even with the deadline on us and the project not even started, there was no time we all got to work together.

Dude projects don't just get made, someone has to develop them.

It's so sad we had the project ready to be made and 5 people couldn't finish it. There was so little to do to pass and yet these people couldn't.

I guess it's my bad too. I wish I could rush the project in a couple of weeks, but unfortunately the guy with a job and 8 other subjects can't.

You can find the project in my GitHub. I'll do a requiem of what it was to be one of these days, after I catch up with all I left aside for this subject...