How a Sudden Spark of Inspiration Transformed My Week

This week has been really tough. I need to keep working on my thesis while managing my freelancing, finishing my film, and preparing for a test tomorrow, for which I haven't studied. Despite all this, I just want to say that I'm thankful for the strength I have.

This afternoon, an idea popped into my head about how I could create a program to automate the scheduling and timetabling for my thesis project. This idea seems exceptional.

Since our oral defense, I’ve felt immense pressure because our thesis project seemed almost impossible and out of my control. I tried using OptaPlanner, a Java library for scheduling with constraint programming, and also explored Google OR tools. Our adviser suggested this tool, which are similar to OptaPlanner but based on built in cp_model.

I spent days trying to figure out how to make them work for automating the scheduling, but it was extremely challenging. I even considered finding a better programmer to pay for help, but I was skeptical about the risks of being caught for cheating. To make matters worse, one of my team members shared our desperate plan with some classmates, increasing the risk of failing the entire year and having to repeat it.

I will not forget sharing with Kuya Nelson before the start of class during my trip to Manila. I told him that I would just get the code from GitHub for our thesis project, and he told me that it was bad and considered plagiarism.

Despite feeling hopeless, I persevered and learned from my attempts. One of the most creative attempts was using ChatGPT to generate code. However, ChatGPT kept producing useless code and failed to create the program I needed.

With little progress, I decided to go back to the basics and understand how scheduling should be done. I formulated a flow for scheduling but faced new challenges with teacher and room schedules. It seemed impossible at times, but after countless trials and errors, and applying my problem-solving skills,

I finally developed a workable flow for generating a timetable for teachers, students, and rooms with added constraints like time sensitivity of a subject and units per week.

This afternoon, my breakthrough moment came. I was emotional and hopeful, realizing that I had made significant progress. Now, on the night of August 28, I'm reflecting on how hopeful I am. I’ve completed the program with assistance from ChatGPT and am currently checking if the output is correct. So far, it’s showing the expected results, and I’m feeling kind of relieved.

After a few minutes of debugging, I found the reason why the program was getting weird outputs. I’ve fixed the issue, and it’s now working!—10:24 PM