Week of 9 Mar
What did you do this past week?
This past week was one of my busiest weeks in a while. I actually didn’t even bother writing the blog post last week because I wanted to enjoy as much time off as I could. I spent the week prior and basically doing my part for IDB Phase 2. Then, I had 4 exams plus a paper due for the rest of the week, so I basically spent every day doing one assignment and studying for the next one. I’m actually really annoyed that we had to take Friday off because I now have to study for 2 exams all over again.
What’s in your way?
Nothing much was in my way, I did everything I had to. I’m feeling really chill right now though because of the extended spring break, and I feel I might let it get to me and procrastinate the next load of work I have.
What will you do next week?
The only real work I have is finishing up phase 2. I’m going to look into Discord as an alternative to meeting up in the lab. Apart from that, I just have some busy work where I have to watch a movie for a foreign culture class.
What was your experience of Test #1a?
It was pretty easy since I took OOP. I would’ve appreciated clearer directions for the first one though because when I asked one of the TAs if a yield function counts as a generator, he initially said no before coming back and saying that it's actually fine. It should probably explicitly state that in the problem.
What made you happy this week?
Of the exams I could take, they both went well, and I think I wrote a pretty solid paper, so I’m happy about that. Apart from the happiness that work is done though, I was really busy so I can’t say I want another week like this ever again.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is environment variables. We have a lot of API keys for IDB, and we uploaded them in plain text initially to Gitlab. Since then we replaced all the keys so that they don’t get stolen, but more importantly, environment variables were a really simple way of managing them securely without too many hoops to jump through.