Blog 6

What did you do this past week?

This past week, we submitted our work for phase 1 of the project. Although we had made quite a bit of progress last weekend, there was still a lot to do before our submission on Thursday. One frustrating part of working on this static website was that we were having trouble seeing our updates reflected in the prod-website. Only later did we realize that this was because the network was caching our website, so we would have to wait for the network to refresh its cache before we could confirm that our changes had been made.

What’s in your way?

Phase 2 of this project looks quite challenging. Professor Downing went over some of the requirements in class, and it looks like it’ll require a lot of learning. We have quite a bit of time to work on this phase (although Spring Break is in the middle of it), but I look forward to learning all of the new languages and tools.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I have quite a few things that I need to do that are unrelated to SWE and unrelated to school. For work relating to phase 2, my goal is to become familiar with React and work on changing our pages from static to dynamic.

What was your experience of comprehensions, generators, and yield?

Each week we learn Python, I’m more and more impressed with the built-in functionality of the language. Generators are no exception. The simplicity of syntax to create these iterators impresses me.

What made you happy this week?

I finally got to watch Pulp Fiction this week. I’ve only seen a couple Tarantino films, but I’ve liked all of them and was eager to watch a classic like this one. It was a very enjoyable movie, and I’m glad I got to watch it in the company of friends who also hadn’t seen it.

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

I read that there’s a new feature among some Chinese apps that uses location history to determine how long people have been in certain cities for. This data is used by health officials to determine who does and doesn’t need to be quarantined. I’m impressed by the speed at which this was implemented, and it’s interesting to see how governments like China can use smart phones at scale in a health crisis.