CS373: Blog 3
- What did you do this past week?
This past week was a weird week — two of my roommates tested positive for COVID, so I’ve been pretty isolated and quarantined.
There is some good news though: I tested negative! I also managed to get vaccinated, so that was pretty cool.
While I’ve been isolating, I spent a lot of time enjoying the outdoors at the park (safely distance of course) and listening to the Steve Jobs biography on Audible.
2. What’s in your way?
COVID!!!
No seriously, COVID.
COVID is kind of running through my friend group right now, so hopefully in a week or so everything will calm down and we can all start hanging out again.
Other than that, classes have been pretty chill and actually a lot of fun! I’m enjoying NLP, really like learning about networks in Ethical Hacking, and am loving SWE so far.
3. What will you do next week?
I’m really hoping I can get back to the boxing gym, as I’ve been isolated for the past week or so.
I’m also hoping I get to see my friends a bit more, now that COVID will be behind us soon.
School wise, I need to finish the Collatz project.
4. If you read it, what did you think of the Continuous Integration?
I liked this Martin Fowler essay and thought it was extremely interesting.
I liked it because it explicitly explained the purpose and design of modern day CI workflows. From my internship experiences, I’ve seen CI pipelines done in practice, but this essay helped connect some of the dots.
The reason I thought it was extremely interesting was because it was written from the perspective of a software engineer when CI was clearly not a commonly accepted best practice.
This is crazy to me!
I can’t imagine working on a large enterprise software project without continuous integration — it’s what I’ve always been taught with.
This just goes to show how far software development has come in the past decades, and how far it could go in the coming years.
5. What was your experience of Collatz? (this question will vary, week to week)
Fun!
I’ve used Gitlab before, but I’ve never been this involved in using the CI pipeline/writing the tests. It’s very enlightening and a great experience.
I also enjoy trying to implement some of the software engineering workflows that Dr. Downing has mentioned to see how they work for me (Ex: writing tests first before writing code, writing a test to verify that a bug exists before fixing the bug, etc.).
6. What was your experience of exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)
None this week — just learned about them in class.
My favorite part of the lecture on exceptions was when we thought through the (horrible) alternatives for error handling when you don’t use exceptions.
I’ve seen exceptions before and I’ve worked with them, but I never really considered the alternatives.
Thinking through the alternatives made it so much clearer to me why exceptions work excellently.
One thing I realized from that lecture: this “thinking through of alternatives” is actually a very important mental model.
In other words, when I’m trying to find the best solution, I should consider all alternative solutions!
What are the advantages of each solution? What are the disadvantages of each solution? Are these advantages really advantages? Are these disadvantages really disadvantages? What is the simplest solution? What does one solution do better than the other?
7. What made you happy this week?
Going to Zilker with my non-COVID positive roommate!
I’ve been cooped up so long in my apartment, it was so nice to spend an afternoon enjoying the weather this past weekend.
8. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
If you guys enjoy reading or are just curious about things, I HIGHLY recommend you get a Medium subscription.
It’s just $50/year for unlimited articles. There are articles on topics ranging from data science, to software engineering best practices, to Obama’s personal blog, you name it!
Sure, you can technically just open up each Medium article in an Incognito tab and get the articles for free. However, I feel like it’s a good thing to support the platform and the writers on it.
Besides, I think you absolutely get your moneys worth on Medium — I’ve personally learned so much in the past year!
