CS 373 Fall 2020: Week of 26 Oct — 1 Nov
What did you do this past week?
I have been able to make some good progress on Phase 3 so far but we still have work to do in terms of refactoring our code, adding comments, and cleaning our database as we realized we have some errors in our data as it stands. I have been falling a little behind in terms of lecture content because I feel like we blazed through the regex portion really fast. I also wonder whether we will learn actual SQL in class because as of now we are learning how to implement relational algebra in Python.
What’s in your way?
I have a lot of work coming up this week in all of my classes and interviews as well. This is going to be a very busy time again (like the midterm season was) but if I pace myself and plan my work out, I should be able to do it just fine. We are getting closer and closer to the end of the year and I can definitely feel that pressure and momentum building in my classes for sure.
What will you do next week?
Next week, as mentioned above, will be a crunch week as we have Phase 3 of the project due on Wednesday and so is my third project for my Modern Web Applications class as well! I also have my weekly homework for my Intro to Data Mining class due on Thursday. I might have some interviews mid-week as well. In terms of this class, I need to make sure I understand the concepts we have covered in class and work on Phase 3. I’ve heard regex has been asked before in interviews so this would be the best time to learn it properly!
If you read it, what did you think of The Interface Segregation Principle?
It was a good paper and really highlighted the importance of multiple inheritance as well as the dangers of “fat” interfaces. These all seem to be a long chain of papers written by the same person in 1996 and I really wonder how the topics and solutions discussed in these papers hold up against the test of time (it has been 24 years since then after all). It would be interesting to see, especially given the fast rate at which technology advances nowadays.
What was your experience of instance methods, class methods, static methods, regular expressions, and relational algebra?
I am familiar with the three types of methods but I didn’t actually know how to use them in Python. I never realized that we had to use a decorator to declare a method as static! Regular expressions seem incredibly useful and I feel like the concept and knowing all the options are more important than actually memorizing the patterns (I can always have a cheat sheet next to me when I need to use them). Finally, I am very familiar with SQL so relational algebra is nothing new to me, although I haven’t really seen it in Python before.
What made you happy this week?
Halloween was today so that was exciting, although I didn’t do anything for it. We did get candy to leave out in front of our door and kept some for ourselves though. So now I have a steady supply of chocolate to look forward to in the coming weeks. It is also the start of November and the end of Daylight Savings time so we get an hour back now (fall back)! I’m participating in No Shave November (which is why I shaved hours before midnight) and really hope to get back into a workout routine with the start of this month.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
By now, I have had a good amount of experience with coding challenges and technical questions being asked in interviews (in terms of recruiting). I have found this list of leetcode questions to be especially useful if you are just starting off in the recruiting process and want to cover all of your bases. From here, you can practice many more questions on the leetcode website (I think they have 1000+ questions on there). Personally, I find practicing leetcode questions to be pretty fun because there are so many creative solutions to problems that I would never have realized if I just did the problem by myself. It’s cool to see how far I can get in a problem and then learn what the most efficient way is (when those two are the same, it feels really good).
