CS 373 Spring 2023: Audrey Chen

What did you do this past week?

Since I didn’t have any exams this past week, I spent my week focused more, if not nearly solely, on the usual classwork/homework for all of my classes. I also tried catching up on lecture content in the classes I skipped/didn’t pay attention in as I studied for my previous exams in other classes.

What’s in your way?

This week was simultaneously a very slow and very fast week for me, in the sense that I felt busy everyday but by the end of the week, I felt like I achieved no progress towards any of my goals — I still feel rather behind in almost all of my classes. I also didn’t get nearly as much done for the IDB project as I’d hoped I would, which was a bummer. Especially as I’m not familiar with the tools being used, my lack of experience and knowledge is hindering my ability to efficiently get my work done, unfortunately.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I’ll be finishing up my initially assigned tasks for phase 2 of our IDB project, as well as study for and hopefully do well on my lab exam. I also hope to finally catch up in all of my classes and get back on top of things.

What did you think of Paper #7: The Liskov Substitution Principle?

I found this paper pretty interesting. Since we’ve gone over the first two out of the SOLID Principles already, (the SRP and Open-Closed Principle), I felt like I had an idea of what to expect for this principle — at least in terms of how it’d benefit object oriented programming. As opposed to the previous papers, I found these examples clicked better in my head in understanding good and bad examples of why this principle works/why it’s necessary to consider when programming.

What was your experience of iterators, comprehensions, and generators?

I had some experience with iterators before in Java and C, but not comprehensions and generators — at least not explicitly. A specific fact I found interesting was how in Python our generators can be written in-line with the declaration(?) of our data structures, like arrays.

What made you happy this week?

I didn’t have much going for me this week, but I had pretty good food Friday night (I finally tried Via 313 on Guadalupe) and ran errands with some friends, both of which made me happy.

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

My tip-of-the-week for this week is to not blow off your classes with the intent to focus on other classes when you’re in a crunch. Personally, I’m very bad at adhering to this rule, but I can acknowledge that this habit has become detrimental to my performance in all of my classes as a whole. Catching up is hard and, at a certain point, nearly impossible as we progress rapidly through lecture content regardless of the “difficulty” of the class.