Overview

This Git repository is an incomplete archive of all my university materials from my BSc in Computer Science & Information Technology at the University of Galway. This archive is incomplete because I only began actively archiving in my third year of study, and so materials from earlier years are generally much less complete or missing entirely.

1. In first year, I took notes on pen & paper (which are so voluminous that I have no intention of digitising them) and for reasons that I no longer understand, I deleted all the files related to each assignment once that assignment had been graded (presumably to free up space on my SSD, despite there being absolutely no shortage). Because I was still using Windows at this time and therefore was unfamiliar with command-line tools like pdfgrep, I found it more convenient to concatenate all of the lecture slides for each module into one or two giant PDF files per module to facilitate easy searching through them, and so all the lecture slides from this academic year are merged by module.

2. My approach for semester one of second year was much the same, except I took notes in Markdown using a program called Logseq and had the foresight to preserve some, but not all, of my assignment files (generally only those related to code-based assignments). The "link-based" & "tagging" nature of this note-taking system means that the notes do not follow the same logical directory structure as the rest of this repository, and is one of the primary reasons why I stopped taking notes using this tool. At this point I had switched to Manjaro Linux, but I continued to merge the lecture slides for each module into one giant PDF file.

   In semester two of second year, I switched to Void Linux and so enacted a far more terminal-based workflow involving hierarchical directory structures and Vim-based text editing. This is the first semester that I seem to have a complete archive of, as I have Assignment/ directories for each module. I also stopped using Logseq and began taking notes in LaTeX instead, creating one large PDF document of notes per module. Some of the lecture slides from this semester are concatenated into mega-documents, others are not, for reasons I do not recall.

3. In third year, I switched to Arch Linux due largely in part to its superior support for the Unity3D Game Development Platform which I was required to use for a Game Development module. I had originally tried to use it in a Debian virtual machine which only had 4 GiB RAM but this was insufficient for Unity3D. This module is solely responsible for why the "Languages" overview of this Github repository states that C# is my most-used language despite me only having used it for one module: Unity3D generates innumerable C# files, and this archive contains 3 Unity3D projects (TeX, followed by Java are the truly most used language in this repository).

   My discovery of tools such as pdfgrep this academic year put an end to my PDF-merging habit, and so the lecture slides for this year onwards are not concatenated into giant files by module. I continued to take LaTeX-based notes for most of semester one, but realised that this was ultimately often less rewarding for me than to just sit and pay close attention to the content of the lecture, which generally resulted in better recollection for me, and so many of the notes documents are incomplete.

   I also began committing my university materials to this Git repository at the end of semester one, something that I really should've been doing since day 1 and something that I can't believe I didn't start doing sooner.