First Post! Hello World!

Welcome to my first post on my CSC318 Blog!

I am a student of computer science in my final year of study. Over the past couple of years, I have learned various things that have deepened my knowledge on the mysterious black boxes that power so many facets of our lives in the 21st century. As I started to learn more and more, however, one thing became clear - much of what is learned in Computer Science revolves around the abstract. For example, as someone who has taken an advanced operating systems course, I can describe various esoteric algorithms on designing the scheduler of a kernel or how to prove the correctness of a concurrent algorithm on synchronizing threads or how many faulty aspects of a system can be reduced to an instance of the Byzantine General's and so forth.

But if I were asked to describe how the GUI in linux works, I would be hard pressed to go into any more detail than just stating some of the superficial aspects of the X windowing system. This has made me realise that I want to know more about GUIs - both the computations behind what make them possible as well as the more abstract and philosophical aspects of what constitutes good design. I want to be able to look at a user-oriented application and confidently identify whether or not it employs good design principals. I want to know more about the history and current state of the art of UX.

I am very confident that CSC318 will be a useful course as I enter the latter part of my degree. I hope this blog can bring some enjoyment to you, reader!

T.K.