Feb, 4th, 2024
SWE accomplishments this week
This was also a very busy week for me. We had many many Survivor Texas production meetings throughout the week, which means we’ve been dealing with interviews all week and scheduling the season. We again 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. We now have far more people applying that would be good picks than we have spots on the cast, which is exciting and stressful.
In terms of SWE, I completed the first project and learned more about how to use Docker and Gitlab most effectively. I also tested out some of the tools to be used later in the SWE class.
What was in my way
I spent an awful lot of time this week on my Graphics project, which is due on Tuesday. 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 first collaborative SWE project and meet up with my teammates synchronously. I will also finish all of my code for the first Graphics milestone and fill out my website more.
Paper #3: Continuous Integration
I thought the Continuous Integration paper was quite interesting. It is a very compelling argument for how important integration practices are for making team-based projects effective.
Thoughts on exceptions
Exceptions are a tool that I don't use enough when programming, when building projects with many layers and tools, exceptions are paramount to make integration and use easy.
What made me happy
This week I kept my girlfriend, which made me very happy. I have also spent a lot of time with her so the school has continued to take 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. Also it was my friends joint birthday party which I had too much fun at.
Tip-of-the-week
My tip of the week is still 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. The more I learn about R the less I hate it, it is a very powerful tool and makes programming for data visualization much easier.