CS373 Fall 2018: Prateek Kolhar | Week 2

1. What did you do this past week?
I spent some time shopping for the right courses and registered for the CS373 course this week. So this is my first blog entry for the course. I spent the first few days on the readings. I found Extreme Programming to be particularly useful. I can see how the concepts/paradigms discussed in it can be easily applied in a workplace. I have taken up a heavy course: Autonomous Robots — practically spent 3 days in the lab working on my bot. I also decided to work under Prof.Greg Durret — very excited about this opportunity.
2. What’s in your way?
The Autonomous Robots course seems to be very heavy. I am considering dropping it given that I am also doing a research project. I will decide on that by Monday. With respect to CS373, I need a team. I have worked on full stack development, built production websites before and am pretty well versed with front-end and back-end tech. But, I pretty much don’t know anyone in class. I wish to do really well in this course and need to find a team of people who are willing to work hard.
3. What will you do next week?
I have a lot of readings to finish in all my courses. I will work on the 1st assignment and be done with it by end of the week. I will also be attending Prof. Durret’s first research group meeting and get started on my project there. I also need to start applying to companies for full-time positions.
4. What’s your experience of the class?
The class has been an interesting experience. I have extensively worked on python before, but I haven’t worked on things like unit-tests, code coverage, etc. — things that seem boring, but, are more critical than actually writing the code. So, I am excited to learn those skills. I, surprisingly, found the readings to be useful and gripping. I also hope to make some friends, especially for the projects to come.
5. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
In the class, there is a lot of concentration on good practices, code coverage, testing, etc. But, I feel IDEs play a very important role while developing large scale projects. So a tip I would give is to use PyCharm for web-development. I have used it extensively in the past. It just makes it easier to debug your code and figure out the intricacies of the in-built libraries. As a student, you can get access to the professional version of PyCharm for no additional cost. It provides a lot of good support for web-development — something that we will be doing a lot in the course projects.