CS373 Fall 2019 Week 10: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan
Nov 4 · 2 min read

What did you do this past week?

This past week I worked on our SWE project and on chemistry homework, as well as participated in HackTX. I really enjoyed working on our HackTX project this year, mostly because we took it lightly and made something fun and deceptively simple from the outside. Check it out here! I also worked on recovering from an injury I had last week, and have been catching up on some personal projects that I’ve wanted to work on for a while.

What’s in your way?

This next incoming week I have a chemistry exam and SWE project due. For the chemistry exam, I am definitely unprepared and need to spend the next couple of days religiously going over homework and learning exercises. For our SWE project, my team and I ran into a major problem last week. The main website we were scraping for our API, ethnologue.com, (maybe due to our repeated requests) put up a paywall that made our current back-end caching and scraping system completely useless. We found replacement datasets and APIs, but there’s a lot of work needed to make the front-end and back-end work with all the new changes.

What will you do next week?

Next week I am going to be completely busy with the SWE project and chemistry, as well as starting the new compilers lab. I’m kind of dreading it because it’s becoming harder to maintain my so far good sleep schedule with the impending deadlines, but in the words of Leela from Futurama: “You gotta do what you gotta do”.

What was your experience with SQL?

I have some SQL experience in the past, mostly through personal projects or in my internship, but not at the level of rigor gone over in the class. I am definitely finding the time we spent going over it in class useful and I feel like I’m learning something. I didn’t even know subqueries existed, and I am finding the recent hacker-rank problems more interesting. The only problem is how difficult it is the debug the queries, but I think that’s something that I just have to get used to.

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

My tip-of-the-week is to use https://regex101.com/! This website is INSANELY helpful for figuring out regex matches and groups, and has many different regex language support, including python, PHP, and javascript! Use it!

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