Jan. 28th, 2024
SWE accomplishments this week
This last week was quite a busy one for me. We had our first Survivor Texas production meeting on Sunday, which means we’ve been dealing with interviews all week and scheduling the season. We had our Survivor Texas soccer game today followed by 6 hours of in-person interviews and a crew meeting, which was all very fun, got to meet a lot of new and interesting people. The biggest thing, however, was finishing the edit for episode 8 of season 1, I have spent so much time on Davinci Resolve it is absurd. Outside of Survivor, I competed in a lot of Intramural sports and attended the CS finance talk, where I learned more about HISAs.
In terms of SWE, I completed all of the code for the first project and made sure that it would work on the HackerRank. I also tested out the Docker Image on my machine to ensure that it would work.
Obstacles
Right now the only thing in my way is being so invested in Survivor Texas to really work too much more on any of my projects. This is the busiest time of the year for the club so it makes sense that it would be consuming most of my time.
Plans for next week
Next week I will finish the SWE project and write many compelling unit tests as well as lots of tested inputs and outputs. I will also finish all of my code for the first Graphics milestone and fill out my website more.
Paper #1: Makefile
I thought the Makefile was very interesting, it is cool to see a make file for a Python project, previously I had only ever written them for my C++ projects. Incorporating all of the unit tests and coverage tests in the makefile automatically also stuck out to me as a very compelling reason to set up Makefiles early in the development process.
Thoughts on Docker, assertions, and unit tests
Docker is an exceedingly helpful tool that I should take advantage of more. I have used Docker in the past to run Cascade for FPGAs in my concurrency class, thought I should expect to use it a lot more when creating team projects, which will likely be often in my future.
I knew that assertions were important before and even currently write my code with assertions in it to help with debugging, thank you Architecture.
Unit tests are something that I have stopped writing frequently since freshmen year. I can see how useful they would be for large-scale, long-term projects where maintainability and scalability are critical factors.
What made me happy
This week I got a girlfriend, which made me very happy. I have also spent a lot of time with her so the school has taken a minor backstep for the time being, I hope you can understand. Survivor Texas has also made me very happy just because of how excited I am for the season.
Tip-of-the-week
My tip of the week is to use ggplot with aes in R to format data into tables. Previously I had used python pyplot and it is just so much more tedious to set up everything yourself than if you understand ggplot and what is happening under the hood. Ggplot does all the work for you and is just as flexible if not more flexible than using pyplot if you understand what to put in the aes parameters.