Michisistemas

Well, this update was something else. I thought my project was aleady “done”… but no. Turns out it wasn’t done, it was in “works if you believe hard enough” mode.
First, I realized something kinda obvious that I still ignored at the beginning: if the user enters literally any number, the program just does whatever it wants. Like, actually. Sometimes I got times like 74:89:92 and I was like… ok… I guess this agent comes from the future or something.
That’s when I went ok, this needs some order. So I added validation to make sure the code has exactly 12 digits. It wasn’t super hard, but I still got confused with the zeros at first (because yes, counting zeros is also hard when you’re tired). Then came the best idea in the whole project (confirmed): the dual mode. Because before it was just “enter a number and pray.” Now it’s not. Now you have two paths: Decode a code andCreate your own agent.

And honestly, making the generate mode was fun but also kind of tricky. It looked easy… until I realized I had to build the number step by step without breaking everything. There was a moment where the code turned into some huge random number that even I didn’t understand.
I also messed up the order several times. So yeah, there were existential crisis moments like “why is this now a 14-digit number???”
Another thing (and this actually made me laugh later) was that I wanted the initials to look nice… but of course, if you enter random numbers, you get weird symbols. So I had to actually look into ASCII properly, and that’s when I finally understood the whole 65 to 90 thing. Before that, I was basically using magic without knowing what it did.

Oh, and GitHub… GitHub again 😭
Updating the README looked easy, but no. There’s always something: the image doesn’t load, the path is wrong, the preview doesn’t show… honestly, GitHub has its own personality.
But yeah, in the end this update actually feels like a real improvement. It’s not just a program that “works” anymore, now it’s something you can use, test, and even kind of play with.
I feel like at this point the project stopped being just an assignment and started feeling more like something mine. A bit chaotic, but it works… and that’s already a lot.

Well, this project didn’t start as something super serious, honestly. It was more like a kind of random idea of “hey, what if a number was actually a secret code”, like an undercover agent type of thing and all that. I didn’t think it would end up becoming a project as such, but here we are.
I basically only have one development record because everything actually took me like two days, it wasn’t something super long, but still, a lot of things happened in those two days xd.

The first day was kind of chaos. I had the challenge code, but I didn’t fully understand what was going on. For example, the stuff with #include and using namespace std;… I mean, I wrote it because it’s always there, but I didn’t really understand why. It was like copying some mandatory ritual so the program works 😭. Little by little I started understanding that it was to be able to use things like cout and all that, but at the beginning it really confused me a lot. Then came the part of separating the number. That was actually interesting, because I didn’t use strings or anything, just math. At first I got really lost, like I divided wrong or took the modulus in the wrong order and everything came out wrong. Literally, one time it gave me complete nonsense and I thought I had broken the whole program 💀. But then I understood that I had to go step by step, like removing the last two digits and like that. It was also kind of complicated to keep the order. Because everything depends on the previous step, so if you mess up once, everything else doesn’t make sense anymore. It happened to me several times that the letters came out super weird or the “time” was like 74:89:92 and I was like ??? but then I understood that it was because the number I was entering wasn’t “valid”, not because the code was wrong. The second day was more calm, there I focused more on making it look nice. I added all the secret agent narrative, terminal, classified system and all that. That part was the most fun, because it was no longer just “enter number and get result”, but it looked more like a mini game or something like that. I really liked that part. Then came GitHub… and well 😭. Uploading the project wasn’t as direct as I thought. Between the README not showing well, the images not loading, the path being wrong… yeah, I took more time there than I expected. There were moments where I said “but if it’s written correctly, why isn’t it showing?” and it was because one letter was uppercase or lowercase different. Very delicate everything.

In the end everything turned out fine, but yeah, it was like another learning apart from the code.
In general, the project is simple, I’m not going to say it’s super complex because it’s not, but still I feel like I learned a lot. More than anything to think step by step, not do everything randomly, and also to have patience when something doesn’t work the first time (which happens a lot xd).

Wanna hear a secret? I had never programmed in C++, I didn’t even know that Microsoft Visual Studio existed, but here you see me now. Even though in theory the project took two days, I had to first learn the basic things of this programming language, so you could say that from before I already had that passion inside me.