Some Significant Progress

In my mentor visit last week, my mentor gave me some very specific things to work and subsequently accomplish in the coming week. I am extremely happy to report that I lived up to the challenge and really accomplished a large portion of the data analysis necessary for continued progress on my final product. I have mentioned in previous weeks of my work on a program that would take a particular data point and compare its distance to the current pipeline infrastructure. I completed a very simplistic model of this program in Java and while it worked accurately and quickly, the end result involved me typing eleven numbers for about 270 data points. At this point I realized that this was not the most efficient way to complete this large amount of data analysis so I turned to a new program/ language Perl. This program allowed me to, more easily, input a file with the corresponding coordinates of different sources, compute the distance to the current pipelines and produce an excel spreadsheet that organized this information in an easy to read and understand format.

Not only did I find myself extremely excited by the work that I was doing and the progress I had made on creating a functional and accurate program, but I was quite proud of the work that I had completed in a timely manner that I was then able to show to my mentor. Needless to say, my mentor was impressed by what I had accomplished this past week and this accomplishment allowed me to move onto the next step in my process.

Now that the majority of the data analysis is complete for my project I will start to focus on plans for the construction of new pipelines. There are so many ways to go about this next step, which I will focus intently on throughout this coming week.