CS343: Blog 6
- What did you do this past week?
Not as much as I hoped!
It was a pretty rough week for me — my car broke down and I got really sick from the second dose of the COVID vaccine.
As the universe would have it, this also happened to be the time a bunch of assignments were due.
Overall, it was a week of hanging on and just moving day by day.
It definitely wasn’t ideal, but I know this rough patch is temporary. Once I get past early next week and turn in these last assignments, I’ll be back in senior year cruising mode.
On a more positive note, I’m realizing I really like some of my classes! I’m having a lot of fun in ethical hacking and this software engineering class in particular.
The assignment we did this week in ethical hacking was super cool — I learned a lot about local networks as well as the root foundations of client-server communication.
I’m having a lot of fun in this course because I’m going to be learning a ton of new things!
Setting up servers in AWS, setting up CI/CD pipelines, and getting better at front end programming and design — I’m super hyped. Can’t wait to dive in!
2. What’s in your way?
Like I mentioned above, I’ve got a couple of looming assignments due early next week (an NLP project that I haven’t made a ton of progress on, and a geology exam that I have absolutely no interest in).
Once I get past these things however, I’ll be having fun again!
3. What will you do next week?
First things first: I need to pass my NLP project and my geology exam. For some reason, my parents are still expecting me to graduate college.
After that — the world is my oyster.
I’m going to go boxing, hang out at Zilker, learn more about networks, and dive into AWS land. All in all, sounds like a great week (after geology).
4. If you read it, what did you think of the Single Responsibility Principle?
I liked it!
It’s a very foundational concept of good software design that I’ve read about in many places.
I couldn’t agree more with the strategy. Each object/class/system module should do one thing, and one thing only.
Doing so, you know where you need to go when you want to add something, adding something has less complexity, and fixing things becomes easier and more maintainable. Overall, it reduces complexity.
One thing I would like to mention though is that it’s also important to not over-engineer solutions — if a problem is simple, usually the simple design will do just fine.
It’s a fine line between great code design and planning modularity for the future, and designing too much in advance and wasting time and effort both in the present and inthe future.
5. What was your experience of IDB1 and reduce? (this question will vary, week to week)
Reduce was fun!
I’m still not super familiar with Python, so it was a great warm up for the large amounts of Python programming I’ll be doing for the web project.
Gotta be honest about IDB1 — haven’t made a ton of progress on it.
I am, however, in charge of setting up the AWS infrastructure for our group.
This is something I’ve always wanted to learn about and do, so I’m super excited.
6. How did you fare in the storm?
Just fine.
We lost water, but we never lost power, so I’m grateful.
Lots of people had it much worse.
7. What made you happy this week?
The feeling of not being sick after getting my COVID vaccine was the best feeling ever — I finally felt like I could go do something with my life.
To be honest, other than that, not too much.
But I know next week is going to be a good one!
8. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
When it comes down to it, all a web server does is listen for connection requests at a certain port and respond to them!
