Blog 5: Week of Feb 14 — Feb 20

What did you do this past week?
This past week, I met with my software engineering group to ideate for our semester long project. Outside of this class, I worked on my neural networks and data mining projects, as well as finished up some quizzes for my Japanese class. Furthermore, I started getting back into the habit of working out, going a couple days a week with my roommate and some others.

What’s in your way?
Learning the ins and outs of pytorch and jupyter notebooks has somewhat slowed down my speed on my data mining project, however, this can be solved with some more thorough reading of the documentation. Additionally, since I just started working out again, I am particularly sore in my legs, so walking and getting to class has been a bit slower.

What will you do next week?
Next week, I will finish up my data mining and neural networks projects, as well as start working on my SWE project.

What did you think of Paper #5: Single Responsibility Principle?
Unfortunately I did not read this week’s paper, so I do not have any opinions.

What was your experience of types and recursion? (this question will vary, week to week)
I am somewhat familiar with types, however, my interest was piqued by how Python handles its integers, where a common range of ints are stored as “small” ints, while numbers outside the range are “big” integer objects. As for recursion, I am pretty familiar with the concept. Additionally, it’s cool how tail-recursive functions can be transformed to an iterative version by the compiler.

What made you happy this week?
This week, I was able to play ping pong for a collective few hours with a plethora of friends. I am looking forward to becoming more skilled, as I find that as the pace of the game picks up, so does the fun. We played a two versus two versus two variant called “king of the court,” where teams of two fight to become a temporary “king,” with the right to stay on the field. There’s actually a fair amount of running, due to the fast paced nature of the game and the constant rotation of teams.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Making sure to thoroughly read the documentation can lead to less time debugging. I often find myself guessing what a function does, later discovering that my implementation was wrong and causing a slew of bugs. The documentation is there to help.