What did you do this past week?
This week, I have been focusing on my other courses and job applications. There was a lot of assigned reading I need to do for my other classes. There was a lab and an assignment due for data management last week. It was not especially difficult but it was great to refresh my SQL skills since it will come in handy for the projects in this class as well. I also worked on the paper assigned last week and it was a shocking piece of article to read.
Apart from school, I have been hitting the gyms to get back in shape for soccer. I attended a few pickup soccer games last week in Seattle and I can feel the couple of pounds I gained during Covid weighing me down. I have also been grinding Leetcode for at least two hours every other day. I set an hour aside every day to submit job applications. I got a few online assessments last week and I have not gotten the chance to work on them yet.
What’s in your way?
I think the online assessments are in my way right now. Some of them are due pretty soon and I need to get them out of the way before I move on to something else.
What will you do next week?
The first thing for next week is completing the online assessments. Then I need to work on another lab and assignment for data management. There are also a couple more readings to do for other classes but there is nothing that I will need to submit. Then, I want to start looking at JavaScript. I have not coded in JavaScript at all so I think it would be a good idea to start learning it before the projects start.
If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #4: What Happens to Us?
My first thought after reading the paper is that I am genuinely disturbed by how women and underrepresented minorities are being treated by some bad apples in the CS community. I think there were a couple of aspects where the system fails to provide women and URM equal treatment. Organizations were not implementing harsh punishments for violations and they were willing to trade the mental well-being of females and minorities for a few sexist, racist but “outperforming” employees. It was depressing to read about the author and her colleague’s experiences and I do believe her article serves the purpose of encouraging people to help change the community.
What was your experience of Collatz, exceptions, and types? (this question will vary, week to week)
Collatz was a simple assignment in my opinion. I think it was interesting to come up with corner cases for the unit tests. Exceptions and types are also pretty straightforward. It is identical to the Java exception hierarchy so it did not confuse me at all. Types in Python are a little different from Java but I have coded in Python for a bit so it did not challenge me.
What made you happy this week?
UEFA Champions League!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
There were some great tools for Java unit testing. Mockito is one that I worked with this past summer. However, there were a few differences with the python unit testing framework we worked with in this class. I think learning how to use this testing framework will help you once you find yourself building something in Java at work.