CS373 Fall 2019: Zhimin Ding

Alan Ding
Alan Ding
Nov 2 · 2 min read

Week 10

  • What did you do this past week?

This past week I have primarily worked on different class projects since most of them are due the end of the week so I need to finish them. This week is also the registration week, so I spent some time talking with my advisors and comparing different classes so I have a smooth registration process.

  • What’s in your way?

Learning different new techs is somehow challenging to me. Right now since our project is specialized many online tutorials no longer apply to the project in a way that is clearly visible to me. I want to have a chance to systematically learn through all these new libraries and packages but time does not allow me that type of leisure. I guess I still need to try to get comfortable with learning new materials independently.

  • What will you do next week?

Next week I will spend more time working with my teammates with this class’ projects; right now we are implementing the full-text search. Also, many of my class projects are now weekly due, so I cannot procrastinate on them either.

  • What was your experience with SQL?

SQL is very different from many programming languages since it is declarative: you do not need to give a set of instructions to your machines to actually query what you want; the engine does that for you. In that sense, SQL is a very fun and easy language. However, I often get annoyed by the SQL errors since many do not include much useful information. They often just pointed you to where is error could be closed too and even that information is not completely reliable. Also, for a query that is long code-wise and contains many subqueries, SQL tends to look messy. Using view can be a way of solving that, but it comes with its own problems.

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

To practice SQL, perhaps you want to create your own dummy SQL database and practice with it. I used PostgreSQL and PgAdmin for my other data management class and I feel it could be a good way to complement the HackerRack exercises since you can modify your database and play around with it.

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