Blog 8

What did you do this past week?

I was very busy this week with school, likely likely because many professors wanted to get our projects and exams in before we left for Spring Break. I had quite a few assignments due this week, along with a paper and two exams. I spent quite a bit of time studying for the SWE exam, and I think I did fairly well on it. Part 2 of the exam has been delayed due to the school cancellations, so I’ll have to review the concepts again before we have to take that.
I was not able to give much time to phase 2 of the project last week since I prioritized other things. Now that Spring Break has been extended, I’ll have more time to work on my SWE and iOS projects. I’m almost done contributing to my iOS project for the alpha release, so I can now devote most of my time to focus on SWE.

What’s in your way?

The data for one of our models in the SWE project is not as clean as we expected, so we need to work on cleaning that. A lot of the components of phase 2 of the project build on each other, so it’s important that we complete our database before moving forward.

What will you do next week?

My team and I need to finish creating the database for our project. After that, we can work on pulling that data with our API and filling in the website dynamically. Fortunately, the deadline for phase 2 has been pushed back, giving us more time to make front-end improvements and write solid unit tests.

What was your experience of Test #1a?

I’ve never taken an exam on HackerRank before, but the process was pretty smooth. I felt more time-crunched during this exam than any of my other CS exams, but that was probably more due to the nature of the problems. I really like the fact that we can run our code and immediately know how we performed on the test cases.

What made you happy this week?

This has been a super busy week, and I was worried that something would go wrong. Somehow, I managed to complete all my assignments on time, and I felt good about my performance on the exams.

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

I’ve been reading more and more about the tools that people are using to help contain the spread of COVID-19. Google is reportedly coming out with a website to triage cases in the Bay Area, so it’s really cool to see how technology can be used in ways that it hasn’t before.
As the world becomes increasingly connected and stores more data than ever before, it’s important for engineers to think about ways to leverage that capability to solve novel problems. It’s also important to think about the ways that new technology can be misused and to build in preventative measures early on.