CS373 Spring 2022 Week 13 — David Tang

What did you do this past week?

This week, I was unfortunately not as productive as I would have wanted on our project. I did some light work refactoring and refining our code in the frontend so that it would be more organized, however I need to get to work on the visualizations. I hope to knock out one or two of them by Monday.

What’s in your way?

Last week, a lot of the my obstacles involved catching up in classes I had missed. This next week, I need to get back to a more productive schedule. In addition to my classes, I need to write a statement of purpose for a the 5-Year Integrated Program I am applying to, so I hope that I can find time to work on that.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I’ll definitely have a focus on completing the two visualizations that I was assigned for our website. In addition, I hope that I can make significant progress in reorganizing our backend code. Unfortunately, we just have a bunch of redundancies in the way that we wrote it, so I hope to factor most of that out and create common modules shared between models.

What did you think of Paper 13. What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You?

I thought that this was an enlightening paper and that it was beneficial to read about the challenges faced by others within our CS community. Regardless of whether we have faced it firsthand, it is important to realize that these prejudices exist and permeate many aspects of our field. It is our responsibility, as the next generation of researchers, academics, and engineers to ensure that these problems do not persist and that we foster a more inclusive and accepting community.

What was your experience of subqueries and refactoring?

I thought that subqueries and refactoring were an interesting and helpful topic to consider. Though the subquery exercise was a challenge and it may be difficult at times to decide when to use a subquery versus a join, I think it is important to know how to utilize both. The example for refactoring was helpful, and though it seemed that the code was purposefully written in an unintuitive way at the start, it was a useful example that got each of the strategies across.

What made you happy this week?

This week, we had officer elections and positions assigned for the CS student organizations. I was so happy to find out I will be serving as President for CS Roadshow and will be Vice President for Q++. Each of these orgs are a strong passion for me and I’m excited to see what changes we can bring to the table to make these more impactful organizations next year.

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

My tip of the week is recharts. While researching how to create visualizations for my project, I realized D3 might be a little complex and difficult to use for our purposes. Instead, I found libraries like recharts that can accomplish the same thing but have wrapped it in a easier component for usage in React. TexasVotes has some great visualizations using recharts on their site and I hope we will soon too!