CS 373 Fall 2019: Week 10

Jason Thomas
Nov 4 · 2 min read

What did you do this past week?

This past week I mostly prepared for and took a few tests. Now that I’m past them, I should have a little break as far as examinations go. My teammates and I also worked to clean up some of the issues we had leftover from phase 2 of the project before moving on to implementing phase 3. Finally, I attended HackTX this weekend. It was a lot of fun. Some friends and I worked on creating a site for helping potential buyers to connect with local tradesmen to commission work. My team for the project was all backend people, myself included, so I decided to step up and do the front end for the project. I ended up learning a ton about React and eCommerce sites. I’m a stronger engineer coming out of HackTX so I’d say it was a valuable experience.

What’s in your way?

I am still in the process of interviewing for jobs. It is a long process, especially for new grad positions, so I am starting to feel a little fatigued. I know that I just need to work through it and keep preparing for interviews, but it would be nice to just have a job and not have to worry about this stuff. I’ll get there eventually.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will focus on working on phase 3 of the project with my team. While this project is more of a front end project, there are still a few tasks that I need to finish on the backend side of things so I will focus on getting those tasks accomplished. After that, I will do my best to assist the front end with what they’re doing.

What was your experience of SQL?

I thought it was neat learning about all the different queries I could do. SQL is a powerful tool. I do wish we had learned about it a little earlier though. There were several cases where I could have accomplished tasks on the backend of the project with one SQL call instead of many had I known better.

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

My pick of the week is MongoDB. It is a non-relational database, which makes it quick to update and add data too. We used it this weekend in our HackTX project. It was a little challenging to adjust to using it after using SQL so much in the project, but once we got the hang of it it was worth it.

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