CS 373 Fall 2020: Week of 19 Oct — 25 Oct
What did you do this past week?
The first part of this week was incredibly hectic as Phase 2 was due this past Tuesday. During this phase, we had two people on the frontend and three people on the backend (of which I was a part of). However, one of the frontend members was not able to write the code to integrate our frontend code with our backend code (set up so that the frontend calls our backend API and retrieves data from our database). Thus, on the last day, the backend team was scrambling to learn React and Javascript on the fly so that it could write the code to have our project meet the requirements of Phase 2. We ended up taking an extra day which means we lost 20 points on this phase but we were able to get our website fully functional and working by the end.
What’s in your way?
This phase was really intensive on the backend team so finishing it was a huge relief. This weekend I am taking to relax and get back on schedule (both physically and mentally). I plan to review some of the content in the lectures I had this week because honestly, most of this week has been a blur and I want to make sure I am on top of my classes moving forward.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I really need to get back on recruiting and making sure I am on a steady schedule. I also want to review some of the content that was covered in my classes from this past week as well. From now on, I think I want to start getting into a better routine in terms of working out, eating healthy, and spending more time outside. I haven’t done any of these in a long time and it would be really beneficial for me to start getting back on track.
If you read it, what did you think of Ethical CS?
Ethical CS was a great collection of slides with voiced over narrating that honestly felt like a crash course in CS ethics. It touched on a lot of interesting points including aspects of game theory such as the famed prisoner's dilemma as well as the tendency to cheat. I actually still need a writing flag and I am now highly considering taking CS349: Contemporary Issues in Computer Science next semester!
What was your experience of functions, lambdas, and decorators?
They seem very useful (I’ve worked with decorators before) but it can also be very tricky. The whole lecture about unpacking and having *args as well as **kwargs (which is very commonplace in Python), can be very tricky in terms of the order when specifying the order in the function call itself. This is definitely one of the harder concepts in Python we have gone over so I really want to review the material before we build on it next week.
What made you happy this week?
My cousin got proposed to yesterday which was super exciting to hear about! Today she came to visit us with the family and it was really nice to get to see them after so long (we haven’t had guests since March). She looked really happy and we played some card games and ate some cake so I had a great time today! It was a nice break from the stressful past week I just went through.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Honestly, my tip-of-the-week would be to learn the technologies that the other team is using in your project. So the frontend team should become very familiar with the backend code and technologies and similarly, the backend team should also be very familiar with the frontend code and tools. This would have saved us from submitting a day late in phase 2 since one of our frontend members did not write the integration code to link the frontend and backend. It would be much better in general if both teams were more familiar with their counterpart. Also if you can, make sure you go out and VOTE!
