CS373 Spring 2022: Griffin Urban

What did you do this past week?

This past week was probably the busiest week I’ve had in a long time. I successfully completed two projects (including phase 3!!) in addition to taking two tests on the same day. Naturally, most of my time was spend dealing with these assignments and unfortunately not on anything specifically fun or interesting. However, I was fortunate enough to go visit my family for the Easter Holiday, and it also served as a way to rest my head about the past week.

What’s in your way?

Like normal, the biggest thing in my way is just a lack of time and energy to get everything I want to do in a day done. Hopefully since we are nearing the end of the semester, the hump will be reached soon where I no longer have to worry about so much work and can focus on relaxing a bit more.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will work on project 4 and another project in my other CS class. I plan to start these early to get them done in time to have a bit of a break at the end of classes and before finals. Other than that there are no big plans that are out of the usual, I only hope to get a lot of the work done.

What did you think of Paper 12. Why extends is evil?

While I understood where the paper was coming from and largely agree with its messaging, I think it took too much of a firm position on its argument that extends is evil. I certainly know the problems that can arise from having class dependencies to maintain, but there also definitely some valid use cases where even if it might make it a tad harder to maintain, it is better than the alternative.

What was your experience of natural join and SQL.? (this question will vary, week to week)

Like normal, I had known a bit about this topic before hand so nothing was particularly new to me, but it was a good refresh on the small information that I might have forgotten (as in specific syntax and how the implementation of natural join is done in python). Overall it was a good review.

What made you happy this week?

What made me the happy this week was that I got to take a nice trip to go see my family and take my mind off of all the school work I was working on. In addition after Thursday, I relaxed with a few friends which was a nice way of taking my mind off of everything.

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

My pick-of-the-week is for all the java and kotlin programmers. If you plan to continue to use either of these languages for future development in websites, and specifically backend connections to database, AWS has a plugin that allows you to easily connect to your database and view its contents in Intellij