52 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
52 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
# Overview
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This Git repository is an incomplete archive of all my university materials from my BSc in Computer Science &
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Information Technology at the University of Galway.
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This archive is incomplete because I only began actively archiving in my third year of study, and so materials from
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earlier years are generally much less complete or missing entirely.
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1. In first year, I took notes on pen & paper (which are so voluminous that I have no intention of digitising them) and
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for reasons that I no longer understand, I deleted all the files related to each assignment once that assignment had
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been graded (presumably to free up space on my SSD, despite there being absolutely no shortage).
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Because I was still using Windows at this time and therefore was unfamiliar with command-line tools like
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[`pdfgrep`](https://pdfgrep.org/), I found it more convenient to concatenate all of the lecture slides for each
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module into one or two giant PDF files per module to facilitate easy searching through them, and so all the lecture
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slides from this academic year are merged by module.
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2. My approach for semester one of second year was much the same, except I took notes in Markdown using a program
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called [Logseq](https://Logseq.com/) and had the foresight to preserve some, but not all, of my assignment files
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(generally only those related to code-based assignments).
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The "link-based" & "tagging" nature of this note-taking system means that the notes do not follow the same logical
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directory structure as the rest of this repository, and is one of the primary reasons why I stopped taking notes
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using this tool.
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At this point I had switched to [Manjaro Linux](https://manjaro.org/), but I continued to merge the lecture slides
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for each module into one giant PDF file.
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In semester two of second year, I switched to [Void Linux](https://voidlinux.org/) and so enacted a far more
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terminal-based workflow involving hierarchical directory structures and [Vim](https://www.vim.org/)-based text
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editing.
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This is the first semester that I seem to have a complete archive of, as I have `Assignment/` directories for each
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module.
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I also stopped using Logseq and began taking notes in [LaTeX](https://www.latex-project.org/) instead, creating
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one large PDF document of notes per module.
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Some of the lecture slides from this semester are concatenated into mega-documents, others are not, for reasons I do
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not recall.
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3. In third year, I switched to [Arch Linux](https://archlinux.org/) due largely in part to its superior support for
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the [Unity3D Game Development Platform](https://unity.com/) which I was required to use for a Game Development
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module.
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I had originally tried to use it in a [Debian](https://www.debian.org/) virtual machine which only had 4 GiB RAM but
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this was insufficient for Unity3D.
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This module is solely responsible for why the "Languages" overview of this GitHub repository states that C# is my
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most-used language despite me only having used it for one module: Unity3D generates innumerable C# files, and this
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archive contains 3 Unity3D projects (TeX, followed by Java are the truly most used language in this repository).
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My discovery of tools such as `pdfgrep` this academic year put an end to my PDF-merging habit, and so the lecture
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slides for this year onwards are not concatenated into giant files by module.
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I continued to take LaTeX-based notes for most of semester one, but realised that this was ultimately often less
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rewarding for me than to just sit and pay close attention to the content of the lecture, which generally resulted in
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better recollection for me, and so many of the notes documents are incomplete.
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I also began committing my university materials to this Git repository at the end of semester one, something that I
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really should've been doing since day 1 and something that I can't believe I didn't start doing sooner.
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