CS373 Spring 2022: Blog 3 Feb 7–Feb 13

What did you do this past week?
This past week, I finished up writing the code for Collatz, as well as followed the general workflow procedures to prepare the project for submission on Canvas. Outside of the software engineering class, I additionally met up with a study group for my Japanese class, which was productive yet fun, as well as finished up my data mining project a few days before it was due.

What’s in your way?
Nothing particular is in my way, although I hope to increase my productivity, part of which is weaning myself off of youtube. Hopefully after some time and effort, I’ll be less prone to fall down the youtube rabbit hole.

What will you do next week?
Next week, I’ll try to get ahead on my neural nets project. The deadline is slightly over a week away, so I’ll need to use effective time management skills, rather than the stress generated by an approaching deadline, to complete the project.

What did you think of Paper #4: Pair Programming?
Having already read the paper in another class, I didn’t find any particular new information. Although, as far as paired programming goes, I’m a fan! I particularly feel more productive when working with a partner, and it also makes the process more fun! Being able to talk about your thought process with another person additionally helps strengthen one’s understanding of the material.

What was your experience of exceptions and types? (this question will vary, week to week)
I have only really worked with exceptions when told to explicitly use them, and thus I sadly find myself not implementing them of my own volition. I’m still not quite sure when the optimal time to use them is. As far as types, I was pretty unfamiliar with Python’s implementation under the hood. For example, I found it interesting that only values from negative five to two-hundred fifty five are “small ints” rather than Integer objects.

What made you happy this week?
This week, I went back home and was able to celebrate my father’s birthday, which was fun. It was nice playing board games with the family, as well as seeing my pets again. Seeing them makes me want to find a pet for my apartment next year, as they are major stress relievers.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
When committing using git, the command “git commit -m” is somewhat useful for efficiency, allowing one to write a commit message on the command line, rather than entering vim.