Week of September 7–13

What did you do this past week?

I did my real analysis homework, stochastic processes homework, swam, worked on the collatz project, and went hiking at Mount Bonell.

What’s in your way?

I do not have anything in my way that I can think of. I think everything is in place for me to perform well.

What will you do next week?

I will work on my neural nets project, swim, workout, and hopefully try new restaurants I’ve never been to.

What was your experience of Collatz, the starter code, the makefile, its optimizations, and exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)

I think Collatz is a pretty cool problem. The starter code is very convenient and handled a lot of set up I would have had to spend a lot of time doing. The makefile is also very convenient (but I still don’t know why “push” is in the makefile). The optimizations are very cool and the expectations seem very reasonable. I also like how the test cases are set up so that people can know when they are missing possible optimizations.

What made you happy this week?

I am happy I got to try new restaurants and foods this week.

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

My pick of the week is a mechanical keyboard. I think hearing my keyboard clicking as I type helps me feel productive. It’s also a lot larger than my laptop keyboard so it’s easier to avoid mistakes.

FOODS

This week I tried a restaurant called Tyson’s Tacos, a small laidback taco shop with a nice patio and slightly quirky vibe. They had a wide selection of tacos with interesting names and ingredients. Because the meal package contained 3 tacos, I ended up getting a duck taco that tasted similar to 北京烤鸭, a baja shrimp taco that was pretty good but could have used more lemon, and a crunchy pork belly taco that had an unbelievable gradient from crunchy to fatty. I will definitely be back to try more tacos because the prices are reasonable, the quality is above average, and there are more interesting combinations to try.

On Saturday, I went to Tumble 22 to try the OG chicken sandwich which was incredibly well designed. The sandwich contained a crispy piece of fried chicken, a balanced ratio of coleslaw to sandwich, and the most amazing crisp sweet pickles I’ve ever had. Even though I typically criticize T22 for failing to get flavor into the chicken’s meat, I think their sandwich does an amazing job of combining ingredients in the right way to keep the tongue entertained. The fries were kind of underwhelming though.