
What did you do this past week?
This past week I took my dreaded networks test which actually wasn’t as bad as I expected. The exam was open notes and ended up being very similar to the in-class exercises that we had been doing throughout the semester. Aside from that, I went to my classes as usual and went out with friends for Halloween weekend which was fun.
What’s in your way?
I have another exam coming up next week that I have to cram for. Aside from that however, I don’t feel like I have any blockers which is a nice change for once.
What will you do next week?
Next week I have to study for another exam and continue working on phase 3 for the project in this class. After phase 2, I feel like the workload becomes a lot more relaxed since it is now just refining the website so I am not too worried about not finishing.
What was your experience of SQL? (this question will vary, week to week)
I have previously used SQL for past internships and personal projects so I knew a lot of the basic select queries, but I never really messed with these different types of join operations that we have been doing in class. I think that this is pretty useful information to know, and I also like that we have been doing the interactive hacker rank exercises during class. This gives us a chance to exercise our knowledge since watching Downing go through examples is a lot different from trying to write your own queries from scratch. I also think that these SQL lessons will be very useful and applicable to phase 3 for the IDB project since now we have to implement searching and filtering. Overall, I would say that my experience has been very positive.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip of the week is to go to hackathons! I went to HackTX this weekend which was a lot of fun and a great learning opportunity. At hackathons, you get to build a project of your choice alongside a group of other students and compete for prizes. To help you, there are also many different resources such as company hosted workshops. 10/10 would go again!
