What did you do this past week?

This past week I had a play I had to prepare and present. I was quite behind on working on this due to a last minute grind for IDB Phase II. Overall though I think the play went well despite ending up finalizing the script the afternoon before and practicing into the night. I also had to work on cleaning up some stuff from IDB Phase II because me and my team were not happy about the state of some aspects of our website from Phase II.

What’s in your way?

Same as usual lack of time although this week I also kind of got a little sick so dealing with both of these problems together has been trying. Other than that I also have a midterm next week that I have to prepare for while also balancing my duties to my group for Phase III.

What will do you next week?

Next week I will have to grind for my midterm on Tuesday and meet with my team to try and get the work for Phase III done. So far for Phase III we have kind of an idea of how we want to implement search though we are still vetting potential tools to see which will best serve our needs.

What was your experience of SQL?

I have used SQL before for an internship so nothing particularly novel, it is a nice change of pace to go from learning a standard run of the mill programming language to something that is less of a programming language and more database oriented. I did find the lecture on subqueries to be quite interesting as I have not used queries of that form extensively. One thing that surprised me was how few people showed up to the lectures this week.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick of the week is a talk given by Sara Vieira called “Build Dumb [expletive] — The Value of Useless Things”. The talk is amazing, it talks about why it is important to build things even when things seem useless because “useless” is subjective, something you consider to be useless could be quite useful to someone else and if you no one builds these seemingly useless things they will never exist. This one of many amazing talks given at NordicJS this year, so if your interested definitely check some of the other talks out. Fair warning though this talk is NSFW.

Zayd Abdullah

Computer Science Student. I make things and I think about them.

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