CS 373 Fall 2019 Week 10 — Atharva Pendse

What did you do this past week?
This past week was pretty busy for me. I was in San Francisco on Monday, a Network Security project which was due on Wednesday, and a take-home exam for my Randomized algorithms class which most of the remainder of my time was spent working on. The midterm exam was pretty difficult (probably one of the toughest I’ve taken at UT) but that was sort of expected. In software engineering, we learned SQL for the first time. It was a fun experience because it was my first time learning SQL. The syntax is a bit different compared to other traditional programming languages, but I guess it works?
What’s in your way?
I have another midterm coming up for my foreign policy class on Tuesday of the following week. The software engineering project is due on Thursday of this coming week. I’m glad that the annoying AWS work has been taken care of in the previous iteration of the project, so this time we will get to focus more on the actual website and code.
What will you do next week?
It will probably be a good idea to try and study for the midterm coming up for my foreign policy class on Tuesday of the coming week. Also, the software engineering project is due on Thursday of this coming week. I am working on the backend, and so will need to take care of searching, sorting and filtering with python and flask. It doesn’t sound like it will take long but its definitely better to start early.
What was your experience learning about SQL?
Like I said earlier, it was a fun experience because it was my first time learning SQL. The syntax is a bit different compared to other traditional programming languages, so it could be difficult to remember everything for the test. It seems to me like database querying could be done better in python, which is why tools such as SQLAlchemy exist. The various joins were interesting to learn about, and will probably be useful since databases are so widely used in the industry.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip-of-the-week is: Check out Google Collab! It is a very useful collaborative online python notebook tool that Google has been generous enough to provide students for free for research purposes. It is handy for machine learning projects since it utilizes Google’s GPUs for training models quickly.
