Cooper Wilk

April 21st, 2024

SWE accomplishments this week

This past week, we had some very very fun Survivor Texas shoots. I also spent some time working on Graphics and added some new features to my website.

In terms of Software Engineering, our team finished up most of our TODOs for the final project and started to work on our presentation. We looked over our code a bit to find areas that make sense to refactor, especially according to our last few papers.

What was in my way

I spent a lot of time this week on my final Graphics project and editing Survivor Texas Season 2 Episode 2, which you should watch! Also filming Survivor Texas starting took up a bit of time, but honestly, all of these were very fun.

Plans for next week

Next week, we will be done with our final project for this class. I will finish my Graphics project and have a good time with Survivor Texas and the episode I'm editing.

Paper #13. What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You

I thought this paper was very imortant and made a lot of sense for this week. Though I think the world and this industry is slowly getting better at being inclusive, it still has so so much to go.

Thoughts on refactoring

Refactoring is an integral part of the software development lifecycle. It's about continuously striving for improvement and ensuring that the code remains flexible and adaptable to future changes

Thoughts on ethics lecture

I enjoyed both of the ethics lectures. In particular, I found the comparison of the philosopher Kant’s ideals of Deontology to constraint optimization and the ideology of utilitarianism to expected value to be a funny way to think about schools of thought in ethics in a computer science way. I also though that they were both quite funny in their deliveries, especially when comparing the prisoner’s dilemma to global warming responsiblity and nuclear disarmament. The part that stuck out to me the most was comparing the election-tampering Russian software engineer to a wide-eyed college student just a few years prior, not wanting to do evil but still ending up in an evil position.I would like to thank them each for their time, it is clear how passionate they each are about doing good.

What made me happy

My date night this week made me happy, it was fun ice skating, dressing up, eating out, and going to a skate part.

Tip-of-the-week

Get the adobe cloud with the student discount, it is only $20 for students and you can use great software like After Effects, Photo Shop, and Firefly.